THIS ISSUE
In Search of Tipping Points
Regenerating Brownfield
Land Sustainably
Rebuilding after Cyclone Sidr
Climate Change and Coffee

ÂŠ Espen Rasmussen/Panos Pictures

HAZARD
RISK
RESILIENCE

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EDITORS
Dave Petley and Brett Cherry

COPY EDITOR
Krysia Johnson

CONTRIBUTORS
Victoria Ridley
Md Nadiruzzaman
Brett Cherry
Dave Petley
Matthew Kearnes
David Divine
COVERS:
Rebuilding the embankment in Padma Pakur, Bangladesh
after Cyclone Alia ravaged the area in 2009.
Villagers form a human chain to carry mud up the embankment
to defend against sea level rise that affects hundreds of
thousands of people living on islands in south Bangladesh.
Where migration is not an option for people living on the
low-lying islands, adaptation is imperative for survival.

Its aim is to provide information
about the research that we and
others are undertaking across
the broad areas of hazard, risk
and resilience, especially the
findings. We hope that this
magazine will be interesting
and informative, and needless
to say we welcome any feedback
that you might have, good or
bad. We intend to produce
two issues per year, one in the
summer and one in the winter,
supplementing multimedia
communications available via
our website and blog.
As I write this editorial, issues
of science communication
are once again in the news,
especially in relation to the
threats posed by the changing
climate. It is clear that
the communication of this
important issue is becoming
increasingly difficult as various
parties become more deeply
entrenched in their views.
It is intensely frustrating to
watch the media debate on
climate change, which reflects
very poorly the reach and
significance of the scientific
evidence that underpins our
understanding of the ways in
which humans are causing the
atmosphere and the oceans to
warm. Indeed, there is little
doubt that the United Nations

body that reports on the state of
the science of climate change,
the IPCC, is conservative in
its reporting of the magnitude
of observed and anticipated
changes to the climate system.
However, it is also clear
that parts of the scientific
community are proving to be
somewhat unhelpful in the
public comments that they
make about climate change.
There has been a tendency
amongst some to express the
processes and risks associated
with climate change in what at
times approaches apocalyptic
terms. Indeed, the term
“catastrophic” is frequently
over used in describing climate
change, and its likely impacts,
to the detriment of wider
understanding of the issues.
This is not to say that the
threats are not real or serious
– they are certainly that – but
using language that at times is
almost religious in its fervour
to describe those threats is at
best deeply unhelpful. There
is a clear need for scientists to
be measured and considered in
their communication of these
threats, and to ensure that the
focus is on the probable, not
the improbable, effects. There
is also a need to emphasise
that the threats associated with

climate change are important
primarily not of its own right
but in the context of other
major changes in the
global system, including
population growth, water
resource depletion, ecosystem
simplification, increased
urbanisation and reducing
food security. It is combinations
of these and other challenges
that represents the greatest
challenge to modern societies.
Of course the same style of
language is also sometimes
used in the description of other
hazards, including geophysical
hazards and security threats.
It is incumbent upon the
research community to give
an honest and open appraisal
of these threats, but to do so
in a well-considered and
measured manner.
This magazine seeks to provide
insight into research in many
of these key areas, and to do
so in a manner that illuminates
our levels of understanding,
and in some cases our lack
of understanding of these
important issues.

Plant, animal and insect species are moving north and to higher places
in regions of the world that have the greatest levels of warming, according
to a study co-authored by Dr Ralf Ohlemüller that was published in
Science. Ohlemüller and his research team calculated how far species
were expected to move if warming trends due to climate change were to
increase. They found that a large variety of species from butterflies to
birds and mammals have been moving north as expected in search of
a suitable climate. Using 54 previous studies on the impact of climate
change on the movement of more than 2000 different species, they
demonstrated a statistical linkage between species’ rate of movements
to higher elevations and latitudes and areas that have the highest
levels of warming due to climate change. This study is the first to link
a wide range of species together that have been impacted by the Earth’s
changing climate due to human production of greenhouse gases.
‘Rapid Range Shifts of Species Associated with High Levels of Climate
Warming’. Science, 333, 6045 DOI: 10.1126/science.1206432

New insights into the
impacts of EPSRC research
A study by Dr Matthew Kearnes and Dr Matthias Wienroth
reveals how the distinction between science and politics is
‘utilised as a resource in both sustaining an institutional
identity and developing political strategies’. They concluded
that measuring and quantifying the impacts made by public
research funding are used as devices to render science
and research valuable. The EPSRC in effect reframes ideas
of research excellence by adopting different conceptual
strategies such as widening the meaning of ‘impact’ to
include societal and policy impacts along with economic
ones. (See ‘The Power of Science’ p.37 of this issue).

Climate change expected
to impact UK’s older population
Extreme weather events due to climate change are expected to increase
in the UK within the next 30 years that will affect built infrastructure
depended on by older people. A study from IHRR’s BIOPICCC (Built
Infrastructure for Older People’s Care in Conditions of Climate Change)
project led by Dr Katie Oven and Prof Sarah Curtis, has mapped future
risks of extreme weather along with the growth of older populations
in England. The study includes work from Dr Ralf Ohlemüller, Dr Sim
Reaney and Dr Mylène Riva. Researchers found that some areas of
the UK likely to experience extreme weather events such as floods and
heatwaves will also have large concentrations of older people in the future
requiring adaptations to be made. The study has produced maps that
identify parts of England where resilience strategies will be most needed
and severely tested in adapting older people’s health and social care
facilities to climate change. (See ‘Built Infrastructure for Older People’s
Care in Conditions of Climate Change’ p.24 of this issue.)

‘Tools of the Trade: UK Research Intermediaries and
the Politics of Impacts’. Minerva, 49, 2 DOI: 10.1007/s
11024-011-9172-4

Living amongst landmines and cluster
bombs on the Lebanon/Israeli border
Physical hazards receive a great deal of attention
from the mainstream press, but man-made
physical hazards also exist especially in the
forms of explosives left from military warfare.
The border between Lebanon and Israel, known
as the ‘The Blue Line’, is a prime example of the
severity of these types of hazards and what they
mean for the people that live there.

Clare Collingwood, a PhD student in IHRR and
the Dept of Geography is investigating the extent
of the landmine and cluster bomb contamination
in Lebanon including their removal, which can
prevent harm and potentially save many lives.
For her research, Collingwood is looking at how
after spaces are cleared of landmines or cluster
bombs they are reclaimed and developed.

New opportunities are available after
contamination is cleaned up, but how these
spaces are re-populated and developed
remains unclear. The research is funded by
the ESRC CASE scholarship scheme and the
Mines Advisory Group (MAG).

Targeted regeneration could be key
to boosting health of coalfield
communities in the UK
Research by Dr Myléne Riva and Prof Sarah Curtis confirms that better
economic conditions, well-being and health seem to go hand in hand.
The research also reveals an increased likelihood of long-term limiting
illness in some coalfield communities that have faced economic
challenges. But some have done better than others in terms of health,
possibly exemplifying cases of resilience. The findings could inform
efforts in regeneration of human health in economically disadvantaged
areas. They are important for understanding the health inequalities still
present in coalfield communities, but also help identify areas that are
most vulnerable in order to help government and community groups
assist in regeneration efforts to address health inequalities directly.
(For more about this research see an in-depth interview with Dr Mylène
Riva about the study on IHRR’s blog: http://wp.me/pSWpn-z1).

The Eden Demonstration Test Catchment (EdenDTC) project co-directed
by Dr Sim Reaney is monitoring river water quality through ten different
stations located throughout the River Eden and its tributaries. Data
collected about the water quality of the rivers is available to farmers, local
communities and anyone interested in improving river health in the UK
or elsewhere in the world. Problems with agricultural pollution arise from
fertiliser, livestock manure and soil erosion. Monitoring the River Eden
can test measures implemented by farmers and the Environment Agency
to reduce diffuse pollution entering the river. Small changes to how
farmers manage their land can lead to significant improvements in river
water quality, but also help them preserve top soil and reduce nutrient
losses. The Eden DTC project is part of a recent framework developed
by the European Commission to improve river water quality in the
European Union through citizen action.
Water quality data of the River Eden is currently available
on the Eden DTC’s website: www.edendtc.org.uk

How earthquakes build and destroy mountains
Earthquakes build mountains through
uplift but also erode them by causing
landslides, bringing them back down
again. Rob Parker’s PhD in IHRR looks
at the evolution of hillslope stabilities
and how landslide hazards change over
time in mountain ranges that experience
earthquakes. He is asking one simple
question in his research: Do large
earthquakes build or destroy mountains?
A 7.9 magnitude earthquake in China known
as the ‘Wenchuan Earthquake’ triggered over

60,000 landslides in the Longmen Shan
Mountains close to the Tibetan Plateau.
The earthquake killed close to 80,000
people, leaving a lasting impact on at
least 15 million people. A study published
in Nature Geoscience by Rob Parker, Dr
Alex Densmore, Dr Nick Rosser, Prof Dave
Petley and Siobhan Whadcoat, using remote
satellite imaging, mapped landslides
triggered by the Wenchuan Earthquake and
found that an estimated volume of material
between 5-15 km3 was moved by landslides.

They were also able to measure the height of
the Longmen Shan Mountains before and after
the earthquake in order to estimate how much
material was added. They found that large
shallow earthquakes may actually be reducing
the volume of mountains, leading to land loss.
‘Mass wasting triggered by the 2008
Wenchuan earthquake greater than orogenic
growth’. Nature Geoscience, 4, 449–452
DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1154.

07

Exploring groundwater
arsenic contamination
in Bangladesh

The role of trust in the resilience
of financial markets

An important study from Prof Peter Atkins
and Dr Manzurul Hassan explores the
spatial variability of groundwater arsenic
concentrations in southwest Bangladesh.
Arsenic contaminated groundwater
currently threatens the health of 70
million people in 61 of 64 districts
in Bangladesh.

In a fascinating study from Work Package 2
of the Tipping Points project: ‘Financial Crisis
in the Banking Sector: Past and Present’,
Prof Roman Tomasic and Dr Folarin Akinbami
provide keen insights into the role of trust in
financial markets including investment firms
and commercial banks.

Understanding the complex processes
of arsenic concentrations in groundwater
and how they spread over time is currently
needed. The study reveals a highly uneven
spatial pattern of arsenic concentrations.
Arsenic-safe zones were found mostly
concentrated in the north, central and
south part of the study area in southwest
Bangladesh (Ghona Union, Satkhira
District) but were scattered throughout.
Arsenic contaminated zones were found
in the west and northeast parts of the
study area.
Modelling used in the study showed
a decrease in arsenic concentration
with an increase in aquifer depth.
(An interview with Dr Manzurul Hassan
about the arsenic groundwater disaster
in Bangladesh is available on IHRR’s
blog: http://wp.me/pSWpn-8Q).
Application of geostatistics with Indicator
Kriging for analyzing spatial variability
of groundwater arsenic concentrations
in Southwest Bangladesh. Journal of
Environmental Science and Health,
Part A. 46, 11
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21879851

Trust is essential to how investment and
commercial banks and firms provide services
to their customers and each other. Researchers
argue that trust is of fundamental importance
in maintaining liquidity in financial markets
and preventing financial institutions from
becoming insolvent during times of crisis.

The realisation that sub-prime mortgage loan
originators systematically failed to verify the
credit-worthiness of sub-prime borrowers
triggered a complete shut-down of global credit
markets which eventually resulted in a credit
crunch and then the global financial crisis.
In this study, the authors explore some case
studies demonstrating that trust is vital to
the global financial system, and can play an
important role in mitigating or even preventing
global financial crises in the future.
The Role of Trust in Maintaining the Resilience
of Financial Markets. Journal of Corporate Law
Studies 11, 2:369-394(26)
http://dro.dur.ac.uk/9327

High unemployment rates in England
lead to poor community health
New research shows that long-term economic
disadvantage associated with low-levels of
employment in some parts of England leads to
poor community health. The study authored by
Dr Mylène Riva and Prof Sarah Curtis looked at
employment rates in different areas of England
from 1981 to 2008. They examined how
employment trends are related to mortality
and illness.
One group of people in the study lived in
disadvantaged areas where employment rates
had been persistently low for nearly three
decades. This group had worse health by the
end of the study period and had worse risks of
mortality, especially in comparison with people
living in places where employment had been
buoyant and well above the national average
for a long time.
The ‘health gap’ between people in areas
of low employment and high employment
are considerable. Researchers say that local
improvement in some areas would need to
be significant in order to eradicate the health
inequalities between communities in England
with different local labour market conditions.
The research is unusual because relatively
few studies have investigated the risks for
health associated with long-term trends in
local economic conditions. Although the
population studied is not exactly representative

of the population of England overall, it is a
large sample of more than 200,000 people,
followed for more than 20 years. Bringing this
information together with local employment
information, produced specially for this study,
has produced a new perspective on risks to
health from poor economic conditions.
The results underline the importance of efforts
to improve health in areas with especially
‘deep-seated, persistent deprivation and health
disadvantage’. The situation in these areas is of
particular concern given that we are undergoing
a general and prolonged economic downturn,
which is likely to affect these disadvantaged
areas most seriously, now and in the future.
This study illustrates work in the IHRR about
risks for human populations that operate over
the long-term. It shows that these long-running
challenges to human health and well-being
are important, as well as risks that happen
suddenly. Building resilience to such long-term
risks is an essential goal for human societies.

Long-term local area employment rates as
predictors of individual mortality and morbidity:
a prospective study in England, spanning more
than two decades. Journal of Epidemiology and
Community Health. DOI:10.1136/jech-2011200306

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From
Around
the
World

Detecting landslides
with earthquake
monitoring networks

Large, fast landslides, especially
those formed from hard rock,
generate earthquake waves that
can be recorded remotely. This
provides the potential to detect
remotely large landslides as
they occur and to determine
parameters such as the speed of
movement.
A recent study published in the
Journal of Geophysical Research
investigated these seismic
signals, focusing on whether
properties of a landslide, such
as volume, can be derived from
the seismic signals recorded
remotely. To do this, 20 known
rockslides from the Alps were
compiled, and the data recorded
in the regional seismic network
was analysed for each event.
The research demonstrates
that these events are indeed
detectable and that they tend

to have a characteristic set of
waveforms – a landslide ‘finger
print’ – that allows them to
be distinguished from other
events that generate seismic
signals. The research shows that
scientists are one step closer
to remote monitoring of large
landslide events, especially
those in high mountain areas,
which may allow both a better
understanding of the frequency
of these large landslides, and the
hazards themselves in
real time.
Dammeier, F., Moore, J.,
Haslinger, F., & Loew, S.
(2011). Characterization
of alpine rockslides using
statistical analysis of seismic
signals. Journal of Geophysical
Research, 116 (F4) DOI:
10.1029/2011JF002037

New model for understanding
rock fall behaviour

No increase in global
risk for big earthquakes

Rockfalls kill hundreds of people per year worldwide, and they cause
severe economic disruption along railway lines and roads. During the
winter of 2011-12 in Scotland, a series of rockfalls on the A890 between
Lochcarron and Kyle led to its closure for over two months causing long
detours (in some cases over 200 km) and serious economic disruption to
local communities. Over the last decade, there have been many studies
that have tried to relate rates of rockfall activity to environmental drivers
such as rainfall, frost and strong winds. Perhaps surprisingly, these studies
have shown poor correlations between these environmental drivers and the
rockfalls themselves. Recent research published in Earth Surface Processes
and Landforms provides a spectacular set of laser scan datasets to look at
the evolution of rockslope failure in Yosemite National Park. In particular,
it showed that 14 rockfalls in late 2010 occurred in a sequence and
suggests that it was caused by stress redistributions associated with each
rockfall event. Researchers have developed a mechanical model to explain
this process. Whilst it has long been suggested that the development of
cracks might be the controlling process for rockfalls, (explaining why they
do not respond to environmental drivers) this study is the first to propose
a direct mechanical model for explaining how these events occur.

Despite the large magnitude earthquakes that have occurred in Japan,
New Zealand, Sumatra, Chile and other parts of the world, the global risk
of big earthquakes is no higher today than in the past, according to a study
published in PNAS. Researchers examined the timing of large earthquakes
with a magnitude of 7 or higher from 1900 to present, after removing local
clustering related to aftershocks, in order to identify any anomalies when
comparing present and past earthquake records. While the global rate of
earthquakes 8 or higher in magnitude is at a record high since 2004, rates
have been nearly as high in the past, and the rate of smaller quakes is close
to the historical average. Any global rate changes in earthquake risk would
require the existence of actual physical mechanisms that could cause such
changes in the first place. While it is possible for large earthquakes to trigger
other earthquakes, this process increases the earthquake risk regionally,
not globally. The study finds that due to lack of statistical evidence of large
earthquakes spreading over time on a global scale and physical mechanisms
that would cause ‘global clustering’ of earthquakes in the first place, no higher
global risk for big earthquakes exists at this time. However, the study warns
that the current threat of large earthquakes in Sumatra, Chile, Japan and
similar areas is above its long-term average and that the ongoing danger
posed by earthquakes should not be ignored.

Reports
Tipping Points
Annual Report
The first annual report from IHRR’s Tipping
Points project is available. It gives an overview
of the project’s progress so far along with its
aims and goals for the future. In its first year
the project has shown that there is clearly much
more to ‘tipping point’ than simply being a popular
‘buzz word’ and that it may actually describe
something quite profound about the physical
and social world we live in.
http://bit.ly/pfTmnM

Building Rural Resilience
in Seismically Active Areas
A research brief was published by IHRR on the
NERC and ESRC-funded project ‘Increasing
Resilience to Natural Hazards’. This project
focuses on how to increase the resilience of rural
communities in Nepal to earthquakes and their
secondary hazards, such as landslides. There is a
clear role to play for both the physical and social
sciences in engaging with communities vulnerable
to earthquakes, especially communities in
developing countries such as Nepal.
http://bit.ly/iK0VHX

A flood scientist, mathematician, geographer,
political scientist, English Studies professor, and
others, talk about what tipping point means for
them in their respective fields and beyond. So if
you’re interested in exploring the ‘meaning’ of
tipping point, give it a listen. http://bit.ly/leTvOe

Brownfield Regeneration
In this podcast from ROBUST (Regeneration of
Brownfield Land Using Sustainable Technologies)
project, Dr Karen Johnson explains different
aspects of the project including how to remediate
brownfield land using recycled minerals known as
manganese oxides left from the water treatment
industry and other sources. http://bit.ly/ozPc8F

Insurers using computer modelling
to identify ‘risky clients’
This podcast from a graduate of the MA in Risk,
Health and Public Policy at Durham University
explains how some insurance companies are using
computer modelling and data mining of people’s
lifestyle choices found on the internet to evaluate
health-related risks.
http://bit.ly/pM038

Video

Tabletop strike-slip
earthquake experiment
Dr Alex Densmore demonstrates the strikeslip behaviour of an earthquake using basic
materials you can find at home. This video is
appropriate for teaching younger and older
people (or anyone else in between) about
how earthquakes occur.
http://vimeo.com/32287249

Uncovering the climate
of the past in Greenland
Scientists from the Tipping Points project travel
to Greenland to collect artifacts (insects and
pollen grains) that will help them uncover the
mystery of a rapid cooling event that took place
in the North Atlantic around 5000 years ago.
http://vimeo.com/36511751

Building Resilience to Landslides
in Mountain Communities
Screencast seminar from Prof Dave Petley
on how mountain communities in Nepal,
Japan and other countries throughout the
world build resilience to landslides.
http://vimeo.com/31140142

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IN SEARCH OF
TIPPING POINTS
BRETT CHERRY joins IHRR
researchers on their quest to
explore the nature of tipping points
‘Tipping point’ is everywhere, from politicians
announcing the impending doom of the
financial economy to scientists explaining the
environmental devastation caused by climate
change. It’s in the newspapers, on the radio,
in scientific journals, popular magazines and
televised political debates. Tipping point is
joined by a sea of other buzz terms in wide
use today, but there seems to be something
about tipping point in particular that makes
it more than a mere metaphor. Tipping point
seems to touch on something fundamental
about our understanding of the world.
But what makes it tick?
What makes a tipping point
a ‘tipping point’?

Tipping point is often defined as an
instantaneous, and in some cases irreversible
radical change that usually comes without
warning. It has been thought of as being
connected to or caused by a series of smaller
changes that came before it.
But tipping points are not only physical, but
social as well, in how people talk, play, fight
or argue, in other words – interact – on a
number of different levels. What is it about a
word that draws us in, makes us understand
or at least think we understand what’s being
described? When we observe changes that
lead to melting in the arctic or a population
catching the flu from the spread of a virus,
why is it that words like ‘tipping point’
seem to get it right? Recently, there have
been a wide variety of things described as
tipping points, from climate systems to
financial and political systems and even
fashion trends.

All of them mostly unrelated except that
each involved a spontaneous, rapid, change;
an unpredictable, transformative turn
of events.
Tipping Points, a 5-year project funded by
the Leverhulme Trust, asks three very simple
questions: (1) Do tipping points actually exist
in the world? (2) Can they be understood
universally i.e. does a tipping point leading
to climate change have any similarity to a
tipping point that causes a bank crash? And
(3) if tipping points exist can they in any way
be predicted or can the world prepare for
them in the future? With as many potential
examples of tipping points in the world today
these questions have far from straightforward
answers. Instead of delving into the many
possibilities of what counts as a tipping point
and how people can study them straight away,
it would be best to start at the beginning
– the origin of the metaphor – tipping point.

Tipping Point first became popularised by Malcolm Gladwell
in his book The Tipping Point.

The birth of tipping point
What is it about metaphors that make them stick
and what allows them to continue long after their
first use? In order for a metaphor to be used in
different ways it needs to be grounded in some
commonality, but be loose enough to describe
a diverse variety of things. As words travel from
person to person and culture to culture they
often transform into something else; they create
something new for the people that use them.
This brings into question to what degree words
themselves actually affect us and whether they
influence the world in really big ways, which
brings us to ‘tipping point’.
In the social sciences, the story of tipping
point begins in the US when it was coined by a
sociologist named Mortin Grodzins in 1957 who
published a study from the University of Chicago
called ‘Metropolitan Segregation’ in the journal
Scientific American. In this study, Grodzins
described what is known today as ‘white-flight’ –
when white people leave a neighbourhood after a
certain number of black people move in. Grodzins
called this social phenomenon a ‘tip point’, which
would later evolve into ‘tipping point’. This was
the first time tipping point was used formally
in sociology. Grodzins actually picked up the
term ‘tip point’ from urban planners and other
housing professionals who observed how a certain
percentage of black people (30 percent) would
cause the neighbourhood to ‘tip over’ and become
all black. Researchers in the Tipping Points project
were the first to come upon this interesting finding
that provided a clue to how words (including the
ideas they refer to) spread.

A study led by social scientists Dr Pojanath
Bhatanacharoen, Prof David Greatbatch and Prof
Tim Clark did a citation analysis that searched for
academic articles that used the term tipping point,
but it also went a bit further than that.
The problem with citation analysis alone is that
it doesn’t give you an accurate measure for
how words actually spread. Researchers used
an alternative approach known as ‘discourse
analysis’. This of course contains another puzzling
term – ‘discourse’. To put it briefly, discourse often
refers to discussion or speech, something that
has been said. However, discourse can also imply
much more than this in academic literature, as
it refers to people’s representation of the world
that is made up of ideas and concepts they have
acquired socially over time. “Discourse analysis
is a plethora of approaches which is based upon
the premise that social realities are constructed
through language”, says Bhatanacharoen. Events,
people or things represented in the media from
newspapers to film and the internet are often
framed in different ways creating new realities
of what they appear to be. For example, wellknown political leaders are framed as tyrants,
liberators, or even fools through different kinds
of media discourse.
Discourse analysis can provide a much deeper
understanding of how tipping point and other
terms are used within and outside of their
respective contexts because, as we know, tipping
point is not limited to only one context and can
be interpreted in many different ways. Like plants
and animals, words do not grow in isolation, which
is why discourse is important to finding out how
they evolve and are copied over time.

The research team are looking at how urban
planners themselves first started using ‘tip point’,
and how it began outside of academia as well as
how researchers that use tipping point reference
each other. ‘This helps us to understand what
features of the term make it plastic and so enable
it to travel between very different discourse
communities’, says Clark.
What makes tipping point unique is that its recent
usage by academics from a range of different
fields originates not with an obscurely known
sociologist from the 1950s, but a journalist with
the New Yorker by the name of Malcolm Gladwell.
It was Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point:
How little things can make a big difference that
led a diverse variety of researchers in medicine,
sociology, climate science and many other fields
to use the term ‘tipping point’. Since 2000,
when The Tipping Point was first published,
the metaphor’s use sky rocketed and it literally
became a buzz word over night. Tipping Points
researchers discovered that in some cases the
only thing that academic studies using tipping
point had in common was referencing Gladwell’s
book. Before Gladwell, this term appears to be
virtually non-existent in scientists’ and humanities
researchers’ fields and suddenly it is part of their
regular vocabulary. How could this happen so
quickly and will it continue this way or will tipping
point eventually go the way of the dinosaur as
many metaphors before it? In order to find out, the
Tipping Points project, along with other researchers
from around the world, are studying how ideas
spread both socially and culturally.

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Social learning
In some ways nearly everyone is acquainted
with copying something they have seen, heard
or read about. The internet is full of this kind
of activity on Google, social networking sites
like Facebook, and blogs. How people copy
each other is also of extreme importance to
business. Retail markets, such as the fashion
industry, rely heavily on monitoring what people
buy. Instead of encouraging individuals to
make their own independent decisions about
what they wear, clothing companies attempt
to influence people’s behaviour in order to get
them to buy their products. If a celebrity is
seen wearing a pair of shoes, jacket or knickers
from a well-known brand, others will often do
the same. But it’s not always clear how and why
people make the choices they do or why they
copy certain things and not others. Why is it
that the name ‘Kristi’ was one of the top 100
baby names in the 1970s, but is now not even
in the top 1000? Despite a recording industry
dominated by digital music, why does vinyl
live on? How did the riots in London evoke
massive looting and vandalism across cities
throughout the UK? There is something about
how behaviour and ideas are socially learnt
through copying that may hold the answer.
Anthropologist Dr Alex Bentley and economist
Dr Paul Ormerod discovered something unique
about human behaviour when people were
presented with information about health
scares such as the avian influenza or ‘bird flu’
epidemic in 2005 and the H1N1 virus in 2009,
better known as ‘swine flu’. Their research
revealed that interest in health scares actually
spreads socially rather than through people
making actual physical contact with disease.
This of course doesn’t mean that all health
scares are solely driven socially, but it does
say something about how they spread rapidly
and can be managed.
Human behaviour, like other forms of animal
behaviour, is learnt socially. But what makes
humans unique is that they can imitate each
other socially like no other animal that has
come before them. Many kinds of animals
including birds and even fish have their own
kinds of ‘culture’, but none are as good as
humans in imitating each others’ behaviour.

“Humans are, first and foremost, social
creatures. In fact, our brains have actually
evolved to handle social relations, and to learn
from others rather than have to ‘re-invent the
wheel’ each time individually”, says Bentley.
In 2005, during the height of the bird flu
scare, President George W Bush delivered a
speech in the US warning people about the
spread of the bird flu virus. This may have been
the tipping point for public awareness of bird
flu as many people were already online and
searching Google for further information about
the disease. After Bush made his speech the
imitated searches on Google for bird flu rose
rapidly. The announcement made by a pivotal
political figure had led to a sudden exceptional
spike in web searches beyond the normal
envelope of change and became a new trend.
The internet reveals a number of interesting
things about how people copy each others’
behaviour, that along with other examples, have
been used to question older models scientists
have used to study human behaviour.

Time and time again we witness how focused
social learning by a few gets amplified as
copying by the masses”, says Bentley. The
internet has only amplified this form of social
copying and understanding how this behaviour
works may allow warnings about disease or
other hazards to be released more strategically.
While tipping point has become extremely
popular and social learning likely has something
to do with how its use has spread throughout
academia and the media alike, what might it
actually describe about the physical world?

The inventiveness of baby names in the US
has tripled since the early 1990s
(grey line – girls, black line – boys):

Many scientists are moving away from the
idea that individuals are rational, autonomous
agents, but instead are much more susceptible
to the behaviour of those around them, leading
them to be influenced socially in a variety of
different ways. “Social influence is a better
model than the ‘rational actor’ especially for
certain phenomena, such as how buzz words
propagate and how ideas spread; how the swine
flu scare became an epidemic; or even how
science makes its progress.
Lorenz attractors. Bifurcations occur when small changes in
a system lead to a sudden big change, causing the system to
divide into two or more.

Above: Bentley A and Ormerod P. ‘Accelerated innovation and increased
spatial diversity of US popular culture’. Advances in Complex Systems
(ACS). http://www.paulormerod.com/pdf/BentleyOrmerod_ACS.pdf

13

The Earth’s atmosphere and oceans
interact forming one complex system
that influences climate (photo: NASA).

Climate-changealcoholism-ocean-atmosphere
There are potentially many physical and
biological systems that involve some kind of
tipping point. Stringing the names of some
these together (like the heading above) makes
for an amusing play on words. It doesn’t seem
difficult to connect tipping points in climate
change with tipping points in the oceanatmosphere system, as both are linked already,
but how can these tipping points possibly be
related to a tipping point of alcoholism? Could
climate change be causing polar bears to hit
the bottle? No, it’s not that these systems
need to be directly related in order for there
to be a tipping point, but that they may share
something much more fundamental that can
be explained mathematically. Tipping points
may occur in very different ways for physical,
biological or social systems, but they may
also express something similar or the same in
mathematics. In order to explore this notion
further Prof Brian Straughan, a mathematician,

has been working on modelling one of the
biggest and costliest health problems known
in the UK and other parts of the world –
alcoholism.
Alcoholism is a health epidemic that has
spread widely throughout the country. Unlike
other models of alcoholism, a model for
binge drinking, developed by Straughan and
colleague Prof Giuseppe Mulone from the
University of Citta, Italy, focuses on young
people who admit to having a drinking problem
and those that don’t. Models for epidemics
have a built-in threshold. Once this threshold is
passed it can lead to critical outcomes, serious
injury or death that can spread throughout
an entire population. Straughan says, “The
main parameter is the probability of someone
susceptible to alcoholism being converted to
someone with alcohol problems through peer
pressure, by associating with those who drink
heavily. And that probability is a key parameter;
if that probability exceeds a certain level
then the basic alcohol-free solution
becomes unstable”.

Those who are susceptible to alcoholism, but
normally do not drink are at risk of becoming
alcoholics through social influence. Abstinence
to drinking shifts into probability of drinking
that could lead to serious harm in susceptible
populations of young people. “You can have a
certain fraction of the population with alcohol
problems and the health care system will still be
stable, but if that population becomes too high
it’s going to be extremely costly, so it’s problems
like this where there clearly is a tipping point,
once it gets to a certain point, can the country
afford it?”, says Straughan. For example, alcohol
treatment for males in North East England which
has some of the highest rates of binge drinking in
the country, increased 384 to 532 per 100,000
people from 2000-06. The equivalent figures for
the whole of England during the same time were
240 to 340 per 100,000. The goal of modelling
alcoholism is to ensure that a certain threshold
is not exceeded in order to prevent an epidemic.
For alcohol problems typical around the city
of Durham in the North East, Straughan is using
a multi-component drinking model: ‘susceptible’,

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‘moderate’, ‘heavy’, ‘heavy and admit to having
a problem’ and ‘in treatment’. Today, wards in
Durham and neighbouring Stockton may have
a binge drinking rate as high as 50 percent.

Another tipping point that has caught much
attention from popular media, academia and
government is the ‘tipping point’ associated
with climate change.

One of the last major transitions that took

In order to combat the spread of alcoholism
a useful model is needed to provide the
national healthcare system with accurate
predictions, which can be used to develop an
appropriate policy strategy. Binge drinking
also affects certain vulnerable populations,
such as pregnant women, and mathematical
modelling could account for them in order
to help prevent disease and birth defects.
Another model that Straughan and Mulone
have developed is similar to one used for
people with bulimia that is split into two
categories – those that admit to having a
problem and those that don’t. Those that
don’t admit to having an alcohol problem is
the larger group of the two that needs to be
addressed by national health policy.

The popularity of tipping point theories of
climate change is relatively recent. A wide
variety of scientists including climatologists
geographers, physicists and mathematicians,
have been investigating whether our planet is
about to cross a critical climate threshold into
irreversible disaster. Some are more optimistic
than others saying that even if the Earth’s
temperature rises significantly in the future,
the change is not necessarily irreversible.
Other theories posited by researchers are far
grimmer stating that not only are we heading
into inevitable environmental disaster, but there
is nothing we can do about it. Finally, there is
a minority of scientists who believe humaninduced climate change is not happening and
that there are other reasons for the planet’s
warming. This group have failed to convince
the majority of the climate science community,
but with the help of the popular media, have
nonetheless convinced a significant number of
people throughout the world, despite a large,
increasing amount of scientific evidence to the
contrary. But how do sudden, rapid shifts in
the Earth’s climate happen in the first place?

Temperatures around the North Atlantic

“There is no such thing as a single climate,
there are multiple climates over space and we
know from our present understanding of the
Earth’s atmospheric system that many places
warm up while other places simultaneously cool
down. The question is whether or not we can
see patterns of climate behaviour which might
make a coherent story about what is happening
on average”, says Prof Antony Long, one of the
lead climate scientists on Tipping Points.

drivers of climate during the mid-Holocene

Modelling behaviour can assist health policy
makers in looking for ways to get more people
into treatment in order to counteract the high
levels of alcoholism in communities and help
them become alcohol-free. There are still
other problems however to do with relapse
which is currently 60-90 per cent according
to recent estimates and modelling the number
of people who go from not admitting to
admitting they have an alcohol problem is
far from straightforward. If there is a tipping
point in alcoholism that leads to an epidemic
in populations in North East England, or other
parts of the world, then mathematics may
hold the answer to stopping the problem
before it starts.

place during a climate similar to the one
we’re in now was a cooling event that
occurred between 4,000-6,000 years ago.
dropped and many ice masses, including the
Greenland Ice Sheet, started to grow again
after their retreat since the end of the last
ice age. This cooling event has puzzled
climate researchers because there are no
obvious reasons for it to happen. It is this
event that researchers from Tipping Points
are currently studying to find out if indeed
this climate change represents a tipping
point that led to large-scale change in climate.
Long says, “When we think about climate
change in the past we look for large external
forcing mechanisms which trigger a shift
in climate such as an abrupt change in the
amount of incoming solar radiation, a sudden
switch-off in the ocean’s circulation or the
collapse of an ice sheet”. According to Long,
the problem is that no such indicators have
been found to explain the cause of the cooling
event: “The rates at which global sea level was
rising or the ice sheets melting weren’t rapidly
changing at that time and the conventional
seem to be fairly benign, yet we see from a
variety of past evidence that the climate in
the North Atlantic region and beyond actually
changed quite significantly”. In order to
investigate how this rapid cooling event took
place, scientists suspect that interactions
between the ocean and atmosphere could
be responsible.

15

As the sea ice melts in the Arctic, less incoming solar radiation
is reflected and is absorbed by the dark ocean waters, causing
more sea ice to melt (photo: NASA).

It is the coupling of ocean and atmosphere
models that serve as the basis of global
climate models because interactions between
both of these complex systems have one of the
greatest influences on climate. For example,
since the ocean covers more than 70 percent
of the Earth’s surface it stores vast amounts of
heat, most of which is located at the equator.
As the heat rises, it warms the atmosphere and
creates air temperature gradients (layers of hot
and cold air) along with winds. These winds
push against the sea surface, driving ocean
currents that circulate warm and cold ocean
waters to different parts of the planet. In a
sense, the Earth’s ocean and atmosphere
form one complex system that directly
influences climate.
When the ocean and atmosphere interact they
create ‘positive feedbacks’ that influence
one another in astonishing ways. Long says,
“A positive feedback is something which
reinforces the consequences of an initial
change”. He gives the example of a climate
process known as the ‘ice-albedo feedback’.
Sea ice in the Arctic is highly reflective.
Because it’s white it can reflect a lot of
incoming solar radiation back out into space,
maintaining or creating colder temperatures,
which in turn can create more sea ice. On
the other hand, if more sea ice is melting it
exposes more of the dark, low albedo sea,
which absorbs more solar radiation and heats
up the atmosphere, melting more sea ice.
These examples of positive feedbacks are
common in high northern latitudes where
changes in surface albedo of the land or the
oceans can change quickly. “That’s why many
scientists think that in the future or even today
the Arctic is warming much more quickly than
lower latitudes”, said Long.

Positive feedbacks also play a role in what is
known as ‘hysteresis’. In hysteresis, temporary
changes in a system are not only long-term, but
irreversible. If someone is to make sense of the
headline splashed on the cover of the morning
newspaper: ‘We have passed the climate tipping
point’, this could be understood as an extreme
example of hysteresis, where ultimate climate
change disaster is irreversible, but it is also
not that simple. The Greenland ice sheet keeps
retreating further and further due to positive
feedbacks that lead to more melting, however,
it is still uncertain as to whether it is indeed
irreversible. The Greenland Ice Sheet has been
much smaller today than in the past – for
example during the last interglacial, about
130,000 years ago, scientists now think the
ice sheet reduced in size by as much as a third
– but it didn’t melt entirely. In fact, it “re-grew
to larger than its present size during the last
ice age”, says Long. If small changes do
make a big difference then much can be
learnt from the past.
As Long has noted, in the case of the
mid-Holocene cooling event, there appear
to be no obvious external factors that brought
about this important cooling of the climate
in the North Atlantic region. This means that
there may be small internal changes in the
climate system that haven’t been accounted
for. But there is a bigger problem still – if the
changes are internal, and are the result of
positive feedbacks within the system, it may
prove highly difficult for researchers to be able
to detect them. Hysteresis also means that
systems may have a kind of ‘memory’ or
‘lag in time’.

So the changes impacting a system either
internally or externally may not come into
effect until much later. According to Long, in
terms of understanding future changes in the
Earth’s climate: “We can eyeball the data; we
can look at patterns from here and patterns
from there. But a more powerful way of doing
this is to integrate your observations with
climate modelling and that’s why we need our
mathematicians and other colleagues helping
us look at the data we’re developing”.
Whether tipping point describes actual, sudden
or transformative events in the world or is
simply a useful metaphor, it has created an
ongoing global discussion that seems to have
its own positive feedbacks. The more tipping
point is used in and outside of the social and
physical sciences, the more it seems to affect
how people identify spontaneous changes in
the world that we are only beginning to
understand. If we are to become more aware
of these unique changes over time and how
they affect the world we live in, the tipping
point concept may serve as a way to illuminate
pathways of knowledge never before taken.
If it does, we could be at the brink of uniting
the world we experience with the seemingly
unknown, myriad of complexity that lies
beneath it.
We may be on the verge of a tipping point.

For further information about the Tipping
Points project visit www.durham.ac.uk/
ihrr/tippingpoints.
Brett Cherry is the Research Writer and Dissemination
Officer for IHRR which includes co-editing Hazard Risk
Resilience and managing the IHRR Blog: ihrrblog.org.

High-up in the forested mountains of South-East
Ethiopia, a country more famed for famine than
agricultural productivity, green trees with plump
red berries thrive. These are Coffea arabica trees,
the source of arabica coffee that is native to this
region of Ethiopia. Dubbed ‘Black Gold’ in a 2006
film, coffee is one of the world’s most valuable
agricultural commodities and in Ethiopia alone
15 million people are dependent upon this industry.

The value of coffee in East Africa
Across the East Africa region arabica coffee thrives in pockets usually at
high altitudes. Coffee farming and the associated production industries
employ millions of people across the region and contribute greatly to
the East African economy, an area often associated with poverty stricken
nations. The economic importance of coffee is striking. According to the
UN, in 2008 the small landlocked country of Burundi was the eighth
poorest in the world and coffee accounted for 84 percent of the total value
of agricultural exports. In Ethiopia, it is not only the economic value of
coffee that is important to the nation. As the homeland of arabica coffee,
producing, brewing and drinking coffee is deeply engrained into Ethiopian
history, culture and heritage.

17

These areas will have to diversify their food
sources, by importing their crop of choice from
other areas or grow alternative food crops that
are more suited to the modified climate.
For coffee farmers, diversification is far
more complex.
Growers of coffee are dependent upon the
crop for an income, not just for subsistence
living as many farmers of food crops are in
developing nations. Coffee plants take several
years to mature, so farmers must wait until
their investment starts to payback. Given the
time to reach maturity, growers are unable
to switch between crops on an annual basis.
Coffee farming is usually the main activity for
many families throughout large regions that are
capable of producing, so if the harvest fails or
is poor, an entire community and their
associated dependents are affected.
Establishing insightful information to determine
which coffee producing regions are most
threatened by future climatic changes is critical,
so that communities can begin to plan, diversify
and mitigate the risk posed by a changing
climate. To begin to investigate these issues our
project explored the past and future suitability
of arabica coffee in eight East African countries.

Threat of climate change

Like all crops, a bountiful coffee harvest is
dependent to a great extent upon climatic
conditions. Arabica coffee is a climatically
sensitive plant: it requires temperatures that
are not too hot, not too cold, perfectly timed
precipitation and no frost. Without these exact
conditions, yields fall, quality declines and
disease amongst plants can become endemic.
Over the next century, climate scientists
predict that global temperatures will rise, that
precipitation will become increasingly erratic,
and that extreme events such as floods and
droughts will become more commonplace.

Such changes in our weather systems will
affect agricultural productivity and the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) has identified that agriculture-based
industries will be amongst the most affected
by future climatic changes. Indeed, several
studies have addressed the risk posed by
climatic change on stable food crop yields in
key producer regions, and in some areas it
is predicted that the yields of wheat, maize,
rice and millet may be negatively affected by
predicted changes in temperature and rainfall.

Over the past 40 years the mean annual
temperature in East Africa has risen by 1.2°C
and annual precipitation has declined by
150mm. During the same period of time,
the total area of land cultivated with arabica
coffee has fallen. Using annual climate data,
we established a model to identify locations
within the eight East African countries that
were climatically suitable for arabica coffee.
To distinguish between regions that were
very suitable and had near perfect climatic
conditions for coffee production and areas that
were within the physiological limits of arabica
coffee plant development, but were not ideal,
we established two different classifications of
suitable locations – those that were climatically
‘optimal’ and areas that would be climatically
‘tolerable’. We found that the number of
optimal and tolerable coffee growing locations
had declined during the past 40 years, which
suggests that changes in climate have already
begun to affect coffee producers.
CONTINUED >

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Building resilience

These findings are supported by the Adaption
to Climate Change for smallholders project
(AdapCC), which was launched by the Fairtrade
coffee company Cafédirect in 20071. Their
coffee farmers in East Africa and Latin
America have reported that changes in climate
have negatively affected coffee production.
“I have never known the weather to be so
unpredictable,” says Willington Wamayeye,
the General Manager of the Gumutindo Coffee
Cooperative in Uganda which supplies coffee to
Cafédirect. “The coffee plants are badly affected
– flowering is stopping. Last year alone we
lost about 40% of our coffee production
because of climate change 2”.
Using the output from three general circulation
models developed by climate scientists and
two different emissions scenarios (giving
different pictures of the social and economic
make-up of a future world) we were able to
derive predictions for future mean annual
temperatures and annual precipitation for
2020, 2050 and 20803. This data was used
to identify the number and geographical
locations of future areas of optimal and
tolerable climatic suitability for arabica coffee.
The results showed a decline in the number of
climatically optimal locations but an increase in
the number of climatically tolerable locations.
Perhaps good news for the East Africa area, but
the geographical locations of these tolerable
areas must be compared to present day areas of
suitability. It is evident that many of the sites
that are suitable for coffee cultivation today will
not be in years to come. For these communities
mitigation strategies and diversification must
be planned for to ensure the sustainability
of livelihoods.

Identifying the limiting factors, whether regions
will be too hot, too cold, too wet or too dry, can
assist in building resilience within current coffee
growing communities. Our research using future
climate data predictions, suggests that the
decline in precipitation will be a more limiting
factor than rising temperatures in determining
the number of future tolerable locations. Research
insight of this sort can begin to inform decision
makers. Increasing irrigation and planting
more drought tolerant rather than heat tolerant
species of coffee could be the key to securing
the future of coffee growing communities.
In recent decades, Fairtrade organisations have
worked with coffee farming communities and
cooperatives to champion fair prices and access
to development opportunities. Guaranteeing a
price for coffee producers is critical as many
growers live in poverty in some of the poorest
countries in the world. Throughout East Africa
the involvement of Fairtrade organisations with
coffee growing cooperatives has brought many
benefits to communities, including access
to education, new water wells and increases
in access to technology. However, for the
coffee growing communities in the highlands
of Ethiopia and throughout East Africa, the
question must now be asked: in the face of
climate change will coffee still be a viable
crop by the end of the 21st Century?

Further information available at
www.coffeeresearch.org
www.eafca.org
www.adapcc.org
Victoria Ridley completed an MSc by Research at Durham
University through the Department of Biology and
Biomedical Sciences and IHRR on the past, present and
future suitability of coffee growing in eight East African
nations.

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REGENERATING
BROWNFIELD LAND
USING SUSTAINABLE
TECHNOLOGIES
BRETT CHERRY investigates how a team of Durham scientists are
searching for methods to restore brownfield land sustainably

“Pollution is nothing
but the resources we
are not harvesting.
We allow them to
disperse because
we’ve been ignorant
of their value”.
RICHARD BUCKMINSTER FULLER
Land and industry underlie the development
of modern society. All around us there
are examples of industrial engineering,
manufacturing, building, innovation and
employment. At its foundation is land.
Prior to industry, much of the land was used
primarily for agriculture, including plant
cultivation and raising animals for food and
clothing. Over time, the materials produced
from agricultural-based economies shifted
dramatically in order to supply the growing
demand of cities created by industry and
technology.

After the first industrial revolution, land began
to undergo a rapid transition in a matter of
decades. It soon became home to a plethora of
industries including electric power generation,
coal mining, steel manufacturing, railroads, ship
building, automotive assembly lines, motorways,
airports and a host of others that have left a
deep impression on the world’s environment.
But like other forms of human intervention,
industry didn’t come without a price and despite
the technological age seemingly separating people
from the ‘natural world’ that gave birth to it,
today humanity is beginning to realise again the
importance of land.
Much of the land that was once used by
industry in the past is unusable today because
of the environmental contamination it has
left behind. While further industrialisation is
taking place all over the world, but especially
in rapidly developing countries like China
and India, many urban and rural areas –
‘brownfields’– have been deindustrialised and
underutilised. Contaminated brownfield land
has often been avoided by communities and
developers due to the risks associated with
industrial pollution, yet it still remains one
of our greatest resources. CONTINUED >

19

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The problem with brownfield
Brownfield carries many definitions and
associated risks with it. It has been defined as
land formerly used by industry that has some
level of contamination, preventing it from being
developed without meeting environmental and
public safety regulatory standards. In the UK,
however, it is simply defined as ‘previously
developed land’. There is currently no universally
agreed definition of brownfield in Europe. The
UK currently has a total of around 76,600
hectares of brownfield land (not including
Wales and Northern Ireland). In 2003, the
Labour government set a target of 60 percent
of all new housing to be located on brownfield
land. So far the government has identified
enough brownfield for 50,000 new homes. Not
all of it is contaminated, but many brownfield
sites in the UK do have light to heavy levels of
contamination, mostly left from industry.
In response to this vital problem, scientists and
engineers throughout the world are researching
ways to restore brownfield land at little economic
or environmental cost.

hectares (estimated by the EEA) and many
others. According to a report released by the
Concerted Action on Brownfield and Economic
Regeneration Network (CABERNET) in Europe:
“Brownfield land will always be with us -- it
is a symptom of the process of urban land
use change, seen as cities evolve to meet the
needs and challenges of a changing society and
economy. There will never be, nor should there
be, no available brownfield land”.

For developing countries such as China,
brownfield land is becoming a growing problem.
Much of its industrial restructuring has left
many abandoned brownfield sites in mostly
urban areas. As industrial expansion continues
in China, more of its land will be transformed
into brownfields in the future. Unless the
transfer to industrialisation in China and other
developing countries is done sustainably, there
will be an even greater need for green, low-cost,
methods to regenerate brownfield land.

Brownfield density (brownfield area as % of total area of country)

There are a variety of mostly expensive hightech methods being explored for remediating
contaminated land, but some of the conventional
ones are ‘dig and dump’, where contaminated
land is moved to a landfill and ‘stabilisation and
solidification’, where cement is dug into the
ground to immobilise contaminants. Stabilisation
and solidification, while much better than the
former, has been found unsustainable in many
cases and prohibitively expensive for communities
who want to regenerate brownfields in their area.
There is also the widely used ‘cap and bury’
method where impermeable barriers are created,
such as slurry walls, in attempt to seal off
contaminants from the rest of the landscape.
The problem with moving soil with contaminants
is that it doesn’t remediate the problem,
but instead moves the source of pollution to a
landfill that may even be located near places
where people live. Another problem with landfills
is that they are subject to the same environmental
processes as the rest of the land. Contaminants,
such as mercury, lead and arsenic placed in
landfills have been known to leach into the
groundwater over time threatening human,
plant and animal health.
The problem of brownfield land is ubiquitous
throughout Europe. According to the National
Land Use Database, other countries throughout
Europe that also have large amounts of brownfield
land include: Germany: 128,000 hectares;
Poland: 800,000 hectares; France: 200,000

United Kingdom
Brownfield Land Profile
Estimated total area of brownfield land:
ENGLAND:

Source:
National Land Use Database ‘04
Scottish Vacant & Derelict Land Survey ‘04

21

Figure 2. Computer simulations allow for the prediction of
contaminant movement through soil. This can be used to help focus
remediation schemes and predict their effects. Credit: Jack Barnard.

Figure 3. Lysimeters allow researchers to test the quality of water
after it passes through contaminated soil. Credit: Jonathan Asquith.

Figure 1. Credit: Peter Swift.

Science and sustainability
The word ‘sustainability’ has been used so
frequently in the recent past that it has been
difficult to pin down exactly what it means,
especially in relation to science and technology.
Usually, if something is sustainable it will be
able to endure for some time and be useful for
generations to come. It also implies that there
will be a positive environmental impact. To
thoroughly address the problem of brownfield
land, a scientific understanding of how to
use resources that are already available in
intelligent new ways is needed. It has become
commonplace in modern society to regularly
dispose of potentially useful materials.
Some of the solutions to its longstanding
environmental problems may actually lie in
what it wastes. Ironically, a lesser known, yet
potentially effective method for remediating
contaminated brownfield land is in some of
the mineral wastes that are discarded from
the clean water industry known as Water
Treatment Residuals (WTRs).
Manganese, iron and aluminium oxides left
from filtration processes used to produce
clean drinking water have the potential to
decontaminate brownfield land cheaply and
effectively. Manganese oxide in particular
forms a large part of the soil’s natural defence
mechanism against pollution and is a mineral
which is present in the soil already. It is
often used in fertiliser and even in dietary
supplements. What makes manganese oxides
attractive for decontaminating brownfield
land is that they are able to transform petrol
and other industrial wastes into harmless
by-products. These chemical compounds that
occur naturally in the soil have the unique

ability to oxidise organic contaminants,
breaking them down. They are able to
immobilise toxic metals in the soil including
lead and arsenic preventing them from
entering into the ground water.

By working with local communities, the
team hope to develop a methodology whereby
local communities can work with academics
and local authorities to regenerate their
brownfield land.

Manganese oxides are also used for
environmental applications in industry.
They are used by water treatment companies
to clean water from reservoirs before it comes
out of the tap as well as for treating air
pollution, preventing harmful gases from being
emitted into the atmosphere. If manganese
oxides are recycled from the clean water
industry, it would prevent one of many highly
useful resources from being wasted. A method
for using recycled manganese oxides and other
minerals from these sources to decontaminate
brownfield land is currently being developed
and tested by IHRR´s ROBUST (Regeneration
of Brownfield Using Sustainable Technologies)
research project in collaboration with the
Wolfson Research Institute and funded
by the Engineering Physical Science
Research Council.

The project is developing a new way to
harness waste minerals for beneficial uses
to land that could be redeveloped near where
people already live, as brownfields are often
interspersed amongst communities, especially
in cities or places where industry was once
located. “Soil itself is very complex and that
is what we’re setting out to understand in this
project. We’ve set up a series of soil trials with
different waste mineral amendments and the
soils contain many different contaminants
left from industry”, says Dr Karen Johnson,
a hydrogeologist who is one of the lead
researchers on ROBUST.

ROBUST is dedicated to developing new ways
to decontaminate brownfield land sustainably
using manganese oxides and other recycled
minerals from WTRs, along with developing
advanced methods for detecting contaminants
in the soil using terahertz radiation (see Figure
1) and evaluating the long-term effectiveness
of the technology using computational
modelling of the land (see Figure 2). It is also
working alongside communities that live near
brownfields in North East England in order to
understand their perspective on the risks posed
by contaminated land and involving them in
developing ways to help regenerate it.

Johnson and her research team are interested
in using minerals from WTRs to treat
contaminated areas of land known as ‘cocktail
sites’ that have a mixture of organic wastes,
including petrol, heavy oil and diesel fuel,
but also metals like lead. This is because
manganese oxide and other minerals can act
as a ‘defence mechanism’ within the soil
that allows it to render a range of different
contaminants inert. This is promising for
regenerating former industrial sites because
they often have a mix of different contaminants
present in the soil. In order to test the effects
these minerals have on contaminated soil from
brownfield sites, special containers known as
‘lysimeters’ (see Figure 3) are used to measure
the quality of water that passes through the
soil. These trials will then help determine how
suitable waste minerals are for treating different
kinds of contaminants in soil. CONTINUED >

INTRO | HIGHLIGHTS | FEATURES | FOCUS | PERSPECTIVES | BIOS

Using ‘wastes’
to treat waste land
WTRs could be the key to providing effective,
readily available ecological methods for
regenerating brownfield land, but how are
these ‘wastes’ actually able to treat soil with
a large range of contaminants that have been
in place for years, even decades? There is a
wide spectrum of contaminants present in
brownfield sites formerly used by industry. The
North East of England was once a well-known
centre of the coal mining industry. Many of its
former industrial sites have been reduced to
little more than wasteland carrying levels of
contamination far above national standards.
“Brownfield land is a really important issue in
the North East, but it is also overlooked. There
are often a lot of brownfield sites lying around
as stagnant, barren wastelands and they are
often eye sores or attract unwelcome attention”,
says Nina Finlay, a researcher on ROBUST who
is doing her PhD on the effects of WTRs on
contaminants in soil.
Minerals from WTRs do one of two things to
contaminants in the land: they either adsorb
them completely, making them stick to the
surface of the material, which prevents them
from moving through the soil, or oxidise them,
breaking down organic contaminants such as

Land, community
and health
One of the biggest reasons for regenerating
brownfield land is to improve the environment
for existing communities that live near former
industrial sites and to create new communities
on brownfield sites. This also involves engaging
with the people who are likely to benefit the
most from applying sustainable methods for
regenerating brownfield. “Previously, there
haven’t been any remediation techniques
available to councils that are cost effective”,
says Johnson. Brownfield regeneration may not
only improve the health of the land, but also the
health of the people who live on it by making
them feel better about their local environment.
Former industrial sites pock marking the
landscapes that people call home can affect
different aspects of their health. In former
coalfield communities in North East England,
many people suffer from debilitating long-term
illness. While the direct cause(s) of illness
amongst people who live near former coalfields
is not known, a sense of hopelessness as well
as socioeconomic inequality as a result of
joblessness pervades many of these areas.
Like water, land that is free of contamination
appears essential to good physical, social
and mental health.

petrol. Some minerals seem to work better
than others at treating specific contaminants.
According to Johnson and Finlay, iron oxide
does particularly well at adsorbing arsenic,
but in combination with manganese oxide
which can convert toxic forms of arsenic into
non-harmful forms, the minerals could actually
have a synergistic effect on contaminated soil.
“On one hand there could be some competition
effects and on the other they could all be
working together so that is something we are
really interested in finding out”, says Finlay.
Johnson says manganese controls many
biogeochemical reactions so it could be that
we don’t need that much manganese to reduce
contaminants present in the soil. But how
does manganese oxide actually work?
Biogenic manganese oxides, like those in
the WTRs, have a nanocrystalline structure,
meaning that from the outside it appears
amorphous, but upon close inspection at the
nanoscale it is ordered giving it a number of
unique abilities for absorbing contaminants.
It is able to absorb metals because it has a
number of vacant sites where positively charged
manganese ions are missing giving it an overall
negative charge. Toxic metals like lead have a
positive charge so manganese oxides are able
to swallow them up. “It’s a slow process”, says
Johnson, as it takes time for the lead to move

into the vacant sites of the manganese
but it’s a strong immobilisation”, she said.
Finlay is currently working with Northumbrian
Water to collect samples of water treatment
residuals to see if there is a difference between
the mineral contents of residuals at different
times of the year. “The aim of the research is
to find out what else the water treatment
residuals are good at locking up and testing it
with real contaminated soil to see if it works”,
says Finlay. “It’s so important to find simple,
low-cost techniques that can be used to
clean up these sites and bring them back into
beneficial use, because otherwise they’re just
left”, she said.
Another important reason for discovering
long-term, ecological, cost-effective solutions
for treating brownfield is that many developing
countries undergoing industrialisation are also
running into problems with brownfield land.
“Even though ROBUST is definitely a project
focused on North East England we would like
to see the methods used in developing countries,
mainly because they often have more brownfield
than us. Fortunately, countries like South
Africa, China and India also have a lot of
manganese oxides”, says Johnson.

23

Prime Minister David Cameron’s government has cut over 1,300 pages from the UK’s National Planning Policy Framework.

This is an opportunity for researchers who
are interested in the physical and social
aspects of how the environment affects
community health.
“People have looked at the association between
green space and health, but not specifically
brownfield and previously used land and wellbeing”, says Dr Steve Robertson, a Senior
Researcher on ROBUST who is working on soil
remediation techniques as well as researching
the social impacts of brownfield land on
community health. “Land is clearly important
to communities. If it is seen as waste or
derelict land and is sitting in the middle of your
community it tells people ‘we’re not building
new supermarkets or housing estates because
no one wants to build here’”, he said.
Many communities throughout the world that
live in rural, urban or suburban environments
live with what is left from an industrial age
that has been passed on to other parts of the
world that were once untouched by modern
technological development. In the UK, laws
governing the use of brownfield and other kinds
of land for development by communities are
beginning to change. It may mean that local
authorities will be able to have more control
over the land around them that could lead to
some improvements in regenerating land and
community health, but in some cases seems
more likely to hand over more power to land
developers to influence councils.
According to the new Localism Bill recently
passed in the House of Commons, UK government
will allow communities to approve development
without requiring normal planning permissions.
This could mean that communities can get to
work right away in regenerating and developing
brownfield land without national or even local

government interference, however, as the
law currently stands it seems that any land
developments could be approved, making it
quite controversial. The National Trust criticised
the bill for not prioritising brownfield land for
development as government has done in the
past. They argue that the UK’s greenbelt could
be in danger because developers may prefer to
develop land that has not been previously used
or that has contamination.
The UK government has cut over 1,300
pages of planning guidance from the National
Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) reducing it
to a mere 52 pages. Conservation groups and
communities alike are concerned that vast areas
of the UK’s greenbelt and rural landscape will
be invaded by housing developments. Kirklees
Council in Yorkshire, for example, plans to
build a total of 25,400 new homes by 2028,
with 2,500 of them to be built on greenbelt.
The Campaign to Protect Rural England and
the Kirklees Environment Partnership withdrew
from the group developing the proposals
accusing the council of ‘lack of transparency’.
Since the new NPPF has become law in April,
the fear is that developers will bribe councils
into developing land leaving little room for
community influence to decide where and how
housing should be implemented. But Planning
Minister Greg Clark argues that Clause 167 of
the Localism Bill requires that brownfield and
poor quality land always be considered before
other kinds of land for development, such as
greenbelt or farmlands. According to Section
106 of the NPPF, developers are already
allowed to sway communities into accepting
developments by offering to build something
for the council.

David Cameron strongly defends changes
to the NPPF claiming that it will give local
communities more of a say in how planning
is run. But if an enticing financial incentive
is given by developers to councils, what is
preventing them from say building on any
greenbelt they wish that could be legally
developed under the new planning provisions?
This is why if councils are already taking sole
responsibility for planning permissions for
brownfield land in their respective counties
they need tools for redeveloping it themselves.
However, some councils throughout England
already have plans to build new homes on
greenbelt including Durham County Council,
which intends to build 3,550 homes on
formerly protected countryside. Newcastle
upon Tyne and Gateshead plan to build 9,700
homes on greenbelt. If brownfield land is to
be preferred for development in the future
then new methods for genuine sustainable
development are needed.
Low-cost, environmentally sustainable
remediation techniques could likely play a
large role in the future for empowering local
communities to take back contaminated land
as planning policy changes over time. The
methods and technologies being developed
by ROBUST may not only make available new
ways to remediate brownfield land, but serve
as an exemplar for how science, environmental
sustainability and community initiatives can
work together.

You can keep up to date on the progress of
the ROBUST project by visiting its website
at www.robustdurham.org.uk.

INTRO | HIGHLIGHTS | FEATURES | FOCUS | PERSPECTIVES | BIOS

The UK Climate Change Risk Assessment
(CCRA) draws attention to the importance of
planning ahead for the effects of a changing
climate in the UK over the coming decades.
While reducing C02 emissions in order to
mitigate climate change is very important, so
too is action to adapt to changes in climate that
are now inevitable. We expect to see changes in
the pattern of extreme weather events (such as
heatwaves and coldwaves) and related hazards
such as flooding. Climate change research helps
us to understand these changes and develop
appropriate measures for preparation and
adaptation to extreme weather events. Health
and social care planners, for example, are
already working to make health and social care
more resilient to climate change. Their task is
to ensure that key services for groups such as
vulnerable older people and their carers are
maintained as well as possible during periods
of extreme weather.
To help with this process the project Built
Infrastructure for Older People’s Care in
Conditions of Climate Change (BIOPICCC), is
working closely with the public, private and
voluntary sections in the UK. We are helping
to organise knowledge about the service needs
in local communities and identify services and
supporting infrastructures which are most likely to
be disrupted due to extreme weather in the future.

Older people needing health and social care
depend on help from their family, friends
and health and social care staff or volunteers
alongside more formal provisions. Also
essential is infrastructure such as roads,
electricity and water supplies, and access to
facilities such as hospitals, clinics, dispensaries
and community centres. The BIOPICCC project
involves researchers from Durham and HeriotWatt Universities, working with local authorities
in England to inform planning for older
people’s care facilities and the infrastructure
that underlies them. The project is part of a
programme of linked studies funded by the UK
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research
Council to examine Adaptation and Resilience
to a Changing Climate (ARCC).
The project benefits from the special capacity
in IHRR to combine knowledge and research
methods from different disciplines to show
how local adaptation over the medium term
can help to allay the impacts of environmental
change. Although it is focussed on England,
this research also has international implications
for assessing, communicating and mitigating
extreme weather events (e.g. floods and
heatwaves) caused by climate change
around the world.

The pattern of extreme weather events is likely
to change throughout England over the next
30 years due to climate change. Preparing for
future events related to extreme weather, such
as floods and heatwaves, as well as continuing
risks of coldwaves, is essential for human
adaptation to a changing climate. Modifying
infrastructure responsible for the care of older
people (age 65+) is important because they
often need to use services and also this age
group is projected to increase relatively rapidly
over the coming decades.
Projections for demographic and climate
change suggest that the effect of future trends
will vary across different parts of England. The
project has mapped the expected distribution
of older people across England by 2031 using
population data from the Office for National
Statistics, to show where the oldest and
potentially most ‘vulnerable’ population will
grow fastest and be most concentrated. Using
the latest available projections for trends in
temperature and flood hazard we have also
mapped geographical patterns of ‘hazard’ for
heatwaves, coldwaves and floods. These maps
help us identify areas where forward planning
is especially important to adapt and build
resilience in services and infrastructure for
older people’s care.

25

FIG 1. Percentage increase in the number of
heatwave events per year between baseline
(1961-1990) and 2030s
(Data derived from the UKCP09 Weather Generator
(Version 2) under the medium emissions scenario).

There is no fixed definition of a ‘heatwave’. For
this study we considered the sorts of conditions
that tend to increase the risk of health problems
among older people. We defined a heatwave event
as three or more days in succession that are hotter
than usual, with maximum temperatures at a
level that will occur only five percent of the time.
Since the definition is relative to prevailing average
temperatures expected in the future, it theoretically
makes some allowance for future adaption to heat
among the older population and modification of
built infrastructure, which may mitigate, to some
extent, projected climate change effects on health.
The findings suggest that the greatest likelihood of
heat waves is expected to be in South and South
West England, while the East, North West, Yorkshire
and Humber are projected to experience an increase
in heatwave events compared to conditions now.
FIG 2. Percentage decrease in the number
of coldwave events per year between baseline
(1961-1990) and 2030s
(Data derived from the UKCP09 Weather Generator
(Version 2) under the medium emissions scenario).

We defined a coldwave as an event where the
daily maximum temperature is 0°C or below for
three or more consecutive days. Although these
events are projected to become less common in
the future, they are still likely to cause disruption,

especially if local authorities do not have plans and
resources in place to cope with them. Studies have
reported excess mortality and increased health and
social care service use among older people during
extended coldwaves.
FIG 3. The annual probability of flooding
around the 2050s
(Source: The UK Government’s Foresight Flood and
Coastal Defence Project, Environment Agency, 2004).

For flooding, we adopted the definition used
in the Foresight Flood and Coastal Defence
Project (Environment Agency, 2004), the annual
probability of inundation. This definition therefore
includes relatively minor floods which may disrupt
critical infrastructure. The findings suggest that
some areas are expected to experience an increase
in flood hazard (both fluvial and coastal), in
particular, the South East, the East of England
and the Yorkshire and Humber Region.
FIG 4. Projected proportion of older people aged
85 years and over in local authority areas in 2031
(Analysis based on 2006 sub-national population projections
by age group at local authority area level. Source: Office for
National Statistics, 2007).

The research suggests that areas experiencing
the most rapidly changing hazards often also
have large and growing numbers of older people,
especially in the oldest age groups (85 years and
over). These areas include parts of the South East
of England outside central London, and the East
of England. Many of these are rural and coastal
areas outside major urban agglomerations.

This government Foresight
programme produced a report on
the challenging and long-term
vision for the future of flood and
coastal defence for the UK. It is
being used to inform policy and
its delivery.
www.bis.gov.uk/foresight/our-work/
projects/published-projects/floodand-coastal-defence

FIG 3.

Legend (probability)

FIG 4.

The BIOPICCC project is
funded by the UK Government’s
Engineering and Physical
Sciences Research Council
(EPSRC) as part of a programme
on Adaptation and Resilience
to a Changing Climate (ARCC).
www.durham.ac.uk/geography/
research/researchprojects/biopiccc
www.ukcip-arcc.org.uk/

The BIOPICCC project illustrates the need for the kinds of interdisciplinary work that IHRR promotes;
geographers, health and social care experts, environmental scientists and engineers are all involved. In this
research we are also engaging with a range of partners outside the Universities, including Age UK, Defra,
the Environment Agency, the Meteorological Office and the Health Protection Agency as well as a number of
important partners with whom we are working in local authorities around the country. International experts in
other countries are also advising the project. This underlines the significance for society as a whole of the agenda
concerning how to adapt to climate change and the value of university research that connects these issues.

See BIOPICCC Research Briefing
1 for further information on the
hazard and vulnerability mapping:

INTRO | HIGHLIGHTS | FEATURES | FOCUS | PERSPECTIVES | BIOS

SURVIVING THE
STORM: REBUILDING
AFTER CYCLONE SIDR
IN BANGLADESH
A Saudi government sponsored house.
The house in the background on the top
right is owned by an elite, which is three
times larger, but built at the same cost.

MD NADIRUZZAMAN reports on
community housing struggles in
southern Bangladesh after the
Cyclone Sidr disaster

Terror of the Sidrâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Night
In mid-November 2007, the coastal
communities around the Boleshwar River
in Bangladesh were devastated by a gigantic
storm surge. In Gabtola, located in southern
Bangladesh, only four houses out of thousands
withstood the storm. There was not a single
family who did not count a huge financial loss
in all three of my field sites. They were familiar
with both cyclone and false cyclone alarms,
but never imagined it could be of such high
magnitude.

On 15 November, the weather was pretty
normal like any other typical monsoon day and
there was no sign of treacherous weather a few
hundred miles down the coast. Even when the
weather worsened in the evening and turned to
thunderstorms, they saw it as a normal tropical
storm similar to the ones they experience every
year and stayed home.
Many of my respondents were in bed sleeping
or trying to sleep when the cyclone struck their
village sometime after 10pm. People who were
still awake described similar things from that

night: winds roaring like a ferocious monster,
trees crashing down; broken branches,
pieces of wood and other debris flying in
all directions. It seemed they had
underestimated the warning.
They were puzzled. Some people made their way
to the cyclone shelter and many came back home
after being blocked by flying debris and uprooted
trees along the way. At Gabtola, those who reached
the cyclone shelter in the first instance had to
head back elsewhere as the shelter was locked,
with the only key located several miles away.

27

When water started pouring into people’s homes
they had no other choice but to seek safe shelter.
They started running to the nearest big houses,
cyclone shelters and other places in search of
safety. They were again proved wrong when a
gigantic water-wall crashed down on Gabtola.
None of the big houses near the riverbank, within
about 100 metres, had survived despite being
inside the embankment. I had been to several
spots where many people had perished together
trapped inside large houses that collapsed.
Inside a cemented single storied primary school
26 people drowned when water surged over the
embankment and eventually flowed above the
school’s rooftop. People who could make their
way to cyclone shelters were apparently lucky.
Those that failed had spent the whole night
floating on the water by holding onto
tree branches.
The following morning people were surrounded
by tens of thousands of dead bodies of their
relatives and livestock along with the wreckage
of their homes, trees and boats. They had no
clothes other than the ones they had on, no food
and no money. Cyclone Sidr had stripped them of
everything. Salt water had contaminated drinking
water ponds. Crops and seeds, fishing boats
and nets were either destroyed or washed away.
The cyclone indiscriminately ruined every single
family at all of my field sites. The Southkhali
Union[1] has suffered from a 709 human death
toll, which is one-fifth of the official total for the
whole country. Gabtola, one of ten villages of
Southkhali Union, alone lost 381 people from
the disaster. There were no major human
casualties in Sonatola Model Village, another
one of my field sites in the same Union, far
inland and quite well protected by the
Sundarbans from the South and the West.
Although close to Gabtola, located in the middle
of Boleshwar River, Mazer Char had only four
human deaths. In fact, three adjacent villages
of the Southkhali Union, all in the same line
along the Boleshwar River – North Southkhali,
Gabtola and Bogi – accounted for more than
90 percent of the total human loss in the whole
Union. Human losses were mainly close to the
riverbank. Other than significant differences
in human death toll, all three sites experienced
loss of their homes, livestock, assets and so on.
When I went to visit my field sites two years after
the Cyclone Sidr disaster, Sidr’s terror was still
visible to everyone who survived that nightmare.
My research investigates how decisions
about relief in Bangladesh are made during
the aftermath of Cyclone Sidr. It reflects on
implemented housing schemes, particularly
in Gabtola, where I took the housing scheme
as a case study because it is the most visible
aid product provided by government and
NGOs which has not only changed the landscape,
but is also substantially important for explaining
different aspects of decisions governing relief aid.

‘Right to housing’ in Bangladesh
Right to housing is one of the five basic
human rights endorsed by the Constitution
of Bangladesh. The home happens to be
an assured commodity right protected by
state law to every household. However,
while distributing housing materials to the
affected community, this constitutional right
seems to have been forgotten. At Gabtola,
there were several dozen families living in
small flimsy huts on the government-owned
embankment that had lost their lands
due to natural causes or socioeconomic
problems. Despite their homes being
destroyed by Cyclone Sidr, they came under
the housing scheme only when they were
able to purchase a small piece of land
inside the embankment at a much higher
rate than the usual market price from the
land owners who were usually elites. These
homestead lands were purchased using
government aid money originally intended
for income generating activities. None of
the people in Sonatola Model Village have
received any housing benefit nor have 24
households at Mazer Char because they live
on disputed lands owned by government.
In both cases housing was not granted in
accordance with their constitutional rights.
Aid money, intended to rebuild devastated
communities has not only slipped into local
elites’ pockets, but has transferred outside
of local economies.

For example, the Gabtola community have
received housing from the government,
donated by Saudi Arabia. For a 10x15
square ft area and 9ft high house 41 tin
sheets and 8 concrete pillars were provided.
The government involved external vendors
to buy tin sheets and make concrete pillars.
A total of 62,875 Taka (approximately
£630) was allocated to build a house,
which includes a budget of 10,000 Taka
(£100) for developing an earthen plinth
and installing a house on it. From this
construction cost, 6,500 Taka was given
to the recipient of the house and the rest
went to labour hired from outside, though
labour force was available locally. Moreover,
a substantial amount of my respondents,
particularly those who are marginalised or
have no connections, gave their contacts a
minimum of 1,000 Taka as bribe to keep
their name on the recipient list. I was not
quite convinced that bribing took place
as every household received at least one
house, but I did encounter several incidents
of bribing during my field research.
Communities expressed frustration over
the government’s housing scheme that
led to the abandonment of many houses.
CONTINUED >

INTRO | HIGHLIGHTS | FEATURES | FOCUS | PERSPECTIVES | BIOS

Built to be abandoned
To give an idea of how this government
housing project could help the communities
involved and be cost-effective, I explored the
same quality housing schemes implemented
by other agencies. Anecdotal estimates from
local builders, tin sheet traders, elected
local representatives and communities
suggest a maximum of 35,000 Taka (267
GBP) to build a house that is part of the
government’s housing scheme. This is a very
rough valuation however and there is a fair
chance of it being undervalued by the local
community as a whole. There is widespread
frustration over this housing scheme for
several reasons. Gabtola people were provided
with houses in the end. In fact, other NGOs
who provide housing, like Muslim Aid, CARE,
DSK, BRAC, Friendship, MCC and others,
had Gabtola as their top priority, but they
were diverted to other villages, following a
promise of a foreign diplomat of building
a model village in the most affected area.
There were rumours of promises for
delivering much better quality houses,
particularly more spacious ones with brick
and cement walls, but the houses received
were far below expectations.

Abandoned government
sponsored house in Bangladesh.

A substantial amount of the housing budget
went to vendors and builders and space
was an issue as one house allocated to a
single household (a household comprises
all members of a family whose meals are
cooked together) was not suitable for an
entire family. People with little to no money
or voice in government complained about
squeezing into a small house while relatively
affluent families’ unmarried sons were
declared as separate households and received
more houses. Finally, design of these houses
was severely criticised for being culturally
insensitive and having no foresight in terms
of liveability. The problems in relation to
cultural sensitivity and liveability were
seemingly shared by all the recipients of
the government housing scheme.
The government houses were normally built
very poorly and were inadequate for people’s
needs. Therefore many recipients that had
rebuilt their homes abandoned them. For
them, budgeted construction costs for
government relief houses (10,000 Taka
each) was simply a waste of money.
There is a large discrepancy between
the government and beneficiaries.

The bureaucratic nature of the ‘relief’
mechanism in place, lack of accountability
and vigilance and eliminating the local
community from hands-on participation has
caused widespread dissatisfaction amongst
the beneficiaries and deprived them from
receiving a house worth living in.
Not only do these houses have little value
for communities, but they also come with
potential health risks. For example, tin
sheets keep the inside hot in the summer
and cold in the winter. Combining this with
poor ventilation, they are like small tin
tombs that can increase heat-induced forms
of disease. These extreme hot and cold
conditions mainly expose toddlers to sickness
and disease, such as pneumonia, measles
and smallpox. However, people who can
afford it have their homes rebuilt with wood
or bamboo fenced walls all around and high
tin-roofs with a soft ceiling of bamboo fence,
plywood, hardboard and so on underneath.
Some reused relief tin sheets and pillars,
others left them abandoned or used them
as sheds for their livestock. Only those
who really cannot afford to rebuild their
homes are squeezing into the houses
government provided.

29

Inset: Abandoned house used as
a cow shed. Below: Abandoned
government sponsored houses
in Bangladesh.

‘Build back better’?
The government of Bangladesh has been
popularising the slogan ‘build back better’,
since committing themselves to rebuilding
Sidr’s ruins. In the case of their housing
scheme, the slogan implies building stronger
houses that can withstand future cyclones.
If the government was right, it could bring
prosperity to the communities of Sidr. But, if
it fails, it could result in a massive loss of life.
In a stormy situation every single tin sheet could
become a spinning blade. Unfortunately, this
grave scenario is likely because Cyclone Aila
– which had one-third the strength of Sidr in
terms of wind velocity and surge height – struck
a few months after the housing programme was
accomplished; it partially damaged every single
house from this scheme. Thereafter, everybody
under this scheme received a small grant for
repairing their homes. Since these houses
became vulnerable to a weak cyclone like Aila,
can they withstand a super cyclone like Sidr?
If not, are we inviting potentially new risks to
the community?
During the last couple of decades, natural

Dushtha Shasthya Kendra
DSK (Dushtha Shasthya Kendra) is a national
NGO that followed a rather different approach
in helping people rebuild their homes from
ruin that was more inclusive of their needs.
They had a budget of 27,000 Taka per house,
which was less than half of the government’s
budget. They informed the beneficiaries of the
budget deficit and asked their advice on how
to accomplish the project with this financial
constraint. They also considered the issue of
extreme hot and cold conditions through the
use of excessive tin sheets and instead used
bamboo-fenced walls using tin only for the top
roofs. They also maintained house plinth height
above the last flood mark and clamped tin
sheets with deeply anchored concrete pillars,
to withstand future cyclones. For assuring
transparency, the DSK took their beneficiaries
to the market where they bought tin sheets at
a bargain price. In the same way, they bought
iron rods, cement and other building materials
to make concrete pillars. They mobilised
family members, relatives, neighbours and
other beneficiaries to help each other build
their homes.

1. Union, often expressed as UP, is the Union
Parishad which is the lowest tier of the Local
Government structure in Bangladesh.

This approach had two impacts: it caused
them to build with care while adding up their
own tin sheets and other materials to extend
their homes; and they were earning income for
building their houses, which kept money inside
the community. They also completed a house
they were a part of from the very beginning
and do not have many complaints other than
envying people who were aided by other NGOs
who provided cement floors, concrete walls
and tin roofs. When I explained DSK’s housing
scheme to the UNO, the chief government
executive who oversees any governmental and
non-governmental development activities within
Upazila’s jurisdiction, he said, “Government
has certain rules to follow and does not have
as much administrative and management
flexibility as NGOs do”. In short, though
every household at Gabtola had an official
entitlement of 62,875 Taka, a substantial
amount of their entitlement was compromised
by sharing with vendors and builders and many
of them eventually abandoned the government
houses only because of bureaucratic red tape.

hazard events have increased dramatically and

About 4,000 houses were distributed under
this scheme, which really makes the financial
figure of their compromise a significant sum.
Thus, entitlement is not only backed by law,
but also breached by it. But, does it pose any
additional threat to future climatic disruptions?

in 2004-05 climate-induced casualties have
increased by 18 percent in the world as a whole.
Statistical, satellite and observational data
suggest that both the intensity and magnitude
of storms will increase in the future. Professor
Bimal Kanti Paul, from the University of East
Anglia, conducted a cyclone-induced injury survey
on 132 people in 12 Sidr affected villages. Paul
later reported in an article in 2010 in the journal
Natural Hazards[2] that 55 percent of injuries
were from falling trees and 45 percent from
flying debris. He also adds that 61.54 percent of
structural collapse was due to trees crashing into
houses, which caused more indoor injuries during
the Sidr event than outside. Taking into account
these findings, in the context of the government’s
‘build back better’ campaign these entirely
tin-built homes will likely worsen the situation
if and when a cyclone occurs again. If those
houses could even survive through a strong
be able to avoid collapsing from damage caused
by fallen trees? These findings need to be
accounted for in government’s housing plan
for the communities of Sidr.

Md Nadiruzzaman is a PhD candidate in the Dept
of Geography and the Institute of Hazard, Risk and
Resilience and is funded by the Christopher Moyes
Memorial Foundation. He is supervised by Prof
Peter Atkins and Prof Phil Macnaghten.

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PUTTING A ‘FACE’
ON RESILIENCE
How is resilience defined by its pioneers
and popularisers in the social sciences?
And what does it mean for how we use the
term universally to describe the world around us?
Social geographer Bernard Manyena states
that resilience has its roots in the Latin word
‘resilio’, meaning ‘to jump back’. He also
reminds us that there is dispute as to where
the term was originally used: ecology, physics,
psychology or psychiatry? He does however
aver that most of the literature is of the view
that the study of resilience evolved from
the discipline of psychology and psychiatry
in the 1940s and it is mainly accredited to
psychologists Norman Garmezy, Emmy Werner
and Ruth Smith. The term arose from studies
involving the exploration of the origins and
development of physical and mental disorders
in ‘at risk’ children of parents with identified
physical and mental disorders, a history of
inter-parental conflict, poverty, perinatal
problems or a combination thereof.
However, ‘what it is’ is still a subject
of considerable debate. What are its
determinants? How can it be measured,
maintained, and improved? How can it be
predicted? Can we identify the ingredients
of it and help in interventions to prepare
people to manifest resilience in given trying
circumstances?
Psychologist Ann S. Masten, who studies risk
and resilience in childhood development,
describes resilience as “a class of phenomena
characterised by good outcomes in spite of
serious threats to adaptation or development”.
It begs the question of what constitutes
‘serious threats’ and ‘good outcomes’. The
UK’s Cabinet Office, in its Draft Strategic
National Framework on Community Resilience
consultation document defines resilience as
“The capacity of an individual, community
or system to adapt in order to sustain an
acceptable level of function, structure, and
identity”. Community resilience is defined
in the same document as “Communities and
individuals harnessing local resources and
expertise to help themselves in an emergency,
in a way that complements the response of the
emergency services”. Sociologist Betty Hearne
Morrow in ‘Community Resilience: A Social
Justice Perspective’, develops this notion of
resilience further:
Physical resilience refers to the strength to
deal with an impact (such as the ability of a
house to withstand high winds or the physical
health of an individual to survive a disaster).
The robustness and diversity of the economy
to survive and recover from a disaster defines

its economic resilience and social resilience
describes abilities within human societies to
adjust to change, particularly ‘to absorb
recurrent disturbances such as hurricanes
and floods so as to retain essential structures,
processes and feedbacks’ [1].
Psychologist Suniya Luthar, who studies
vulnerability and resilience in young people,
in a valiant attempt to defend the construct
of resilience in the face of mounting concern
regarding its definitional opaqueness in
some studies, sets out to offer clarity but
regrettably does not help matters by
defining resilience thus:
Resilience is operationally defined in this
volume, as a dynamic developmental process
reflecting evidence of positive adaptation
despite significant life adversity. Resilience
is not believed to be a child attribute operating
in isolation; rather it is viewed as a phenomena,
a hypothetical construct, that must be inferred
from an individual manifesting competent
functioning despite significant adversity[2].
One is left even more perplexed about
resilience, with questions such as what
determines the outcomes of resilience,
who defines competent functioning; would
we recognise resilience if we tripped over it?
How can we make the term useful? How can
we make the characteristics of it observable
and amenable to measurement and being
compared from study to study?
Luthar states however that two factors appear
to be evident when the construct of resilience
is used: adversity – a shock to the system,
whether human or natural – and a response
of the system to that shock, in order to deal
with it.
The responses can vary, there is no
predictability, the system can ‘adapt to’,
succumb to, be strengthened or transformed
by a shock, but one thing is certain and that
is regardless of the shock to the system, and
regardless of the nature of the response of
the system, the system itself has changed
inexorably. It is new, not the same as before,
a qualitatively different entity is now in
existence, made so by the effects of the
shock and the response of the system,
melding into something qualitatively different.
There is a formal definition of resilience from
the United Nations International Strategy
For Disaster Reduction (ISDR) which is
being widely used at present: “The ability of
a system, community or society exposed to
hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate to and
recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely

Defining resilience is far from
straightforward as it is ever changing
and evolving says DAVID DIVINE

and efficient manner, including through the
preservation and restoration of its essential
basic structures and functions”[3].
My own perspective on resilience includes
the two prerequisites outlined by Luthar –
adversity and response. The new state of being
consisting of the ingredients of the shock to the
former system – the former system itself and
the response of the former system to the shock
– is where I wish to focus in terms of trying
to answer some of the outstanding questions
relating to resilience.
The manifesting of resilience however
identified is seen as something positively
responding to the shock, although the nature
of that ‘positively responding,’ is as yet
unclear. What we appear to know is that
the nature of that resilience is episodic,
developmental, constantly changing depending
upon circumstances and questionably
predictable. Whether one can prepare for a
pattern of resiliency for a further shock to the
system, incorporating the lessons of the past,
is subject to debate although the work amongst
researchers suggests that this is possible.
The question of whether resiliency pathways
– stepping stones – can be worked out into
the clouds of an unknown future is still
subject to debate.
Perhaps we simply need to accept that
according to sociologist and social worker
Lena Dominelli:
Resilience is a contested, eclectic, and
perhaps elastic term that has moved from its
accepted meaning in the physical sciences
as the capacity of materials to respond to
stress, to the social sciences and the arts and
humanities where this definition is often used
uncritically to manage crises. In the process,
it has re-emerged as an active concept as the
capacity of systems, whether natural, human
or hybrid, to sustain themselves in the face
of endogenous and exogenous shocks to an
existing state.
The nature of that sustainability, the
ingredients of it, the origins of it, how it is
maintained and developed, whether it can be
replicated, would we recognise it if we came
across it, is all still unclear.

David Divine is a PhD candidate in the School of
Applied Social Sciences. His research focuses on the
experience of living in an orphanage and individual
resilience. He is supervised by Prof Lena Dominelli.

3. United Nations International Strategy
For Disaster Reduction (ISDR)

4. Dominelli, L. 2011 (private
communication with the author)

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Dave Petley and Brett Cherry review the
harrowing landslide event that took place in
1966 in South Wales â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the Aberfan Disaster.

33

In the years leading up to the landslide,
water from the hillside had been a perennial
problem for the people of Aberfan. Starting
in 1949, and possibly earlier, a series of
floods had affected the upper part of the
town, causing damage and disruption, and
leaving a legacy of a ‘slimy black deposit’ in
its wake, which was almost certainly mine
waste. The people of the town repeatedly
wrote to the council and the National Coal
Board asking for this problem to be addressed
to no effect; it is ironic that in the aftermath
of this disaster this flooding issue was solved
through the construction of a simple culvert.

The story of the Aberfan Disaster is seared
into the memories of a generation of people
in South Wales, and it remains a tragedy of
huge proportions. Today, 45 years after the
disaster, there is much to learn from the events
leading up to, and that occurred on, the day.
Prior to the disaster, Aberfan was just another
small, Welsh coal mining village, located in
the valleys of South Wales. Essentially the
reason for the existence of the village lay in
coal mining – it was founded shortly after the
first excavations for the Merthyr Vale Colliery
in 1869. The village was formed primarily of
a close-knit community of miners and their
families, but was sufficiently large to be
able to sustain both a primary and
secondary school.

By 1969, seven tips had been constructed.
Tip 7, from which the disastrous landslide
developed, was started in 1958, and reached
a height of about 40 metres. It contained
about 230,000 m3 of waste. The material was
transported to the tip on trams that were hauled
up an incline by a series of motors, before the
waste was dumped on the tip by a crane.

Pictures from the post-war period show that
the hills above the village were dominated
by a series of enormous spoil heaps. Dealing
with the waste is a perennial problem in coal
mining, which often generates large volumes
of dirty material that has little economic use.
In South Wales, as elsewhere, it was common
to pile the waste close to the mine workings
– in the case of Aberfan on the slopes above
the village.

This area of South Wales has a wet climate
(average rainfall is about 1500 mm per year),
and the hillsides are marked by lines of springs.
The presence of these springs on the hillslopes
above was noted on Ordnance Survey maps
dating from the late 19th Century. Remarkably,
some older tips at Aberfan built on springs or
watercourses had previously failed – for example,
Tip 4 slipped in 1944, and Tip 5 had a large
bulge that was considered to be an indication
that it was unstable. Furthermore, just down
the valley of Abercynon, a landslide developed
in a tip in 1939 that buried a road to a depth of
nearly seven metres. And so, the arguments that
the events at Aberfan were unprecedented, or
could not have been anticipated, cannot
be sustained.

Mining at Aberfan started in 1869; initially
the waste was dumped in tips on the slope
adjacent to the mine. However, as the volume
of material increased, new tips were built on
the slopes higher up the hillside.

The Commission of Enquiry noted that when
coal waste tips are concerned, “water is
undoubtedly the root cause of most failures”.
This was not a new finding – indeed it had
been known for at least 40 years – and 45
years on it is still the case.

The disaster itself occurred on 21st October
1966 at about 9:15am. The day was calm
and sunny at 7:30am, when the team of
men responsible for the dumping of mine
waste on Tip 7 arrived for work. At the top
of Tip 7 they found that it had subsided by
about three metres. The team had to send a
messenger down to report this information to
the mine managers as the telephone was out
of action as a result of the repeated theft of
the cable. A decision was taken by the mine
managers to cease tipping at that location,
and an additional team was sent up to move
the tipping infrastructure back from the
area of active movement. By the time they
reached the top, the subsidence had further
developed, with another three metres of
movement being reported.
The final, catastrophic collapse developed
apparently spontaneously as an initially
rotational movement that rapidly transitioned
into a flow. About 107,000m3 of material
flowed down the hillside and into the village.
Descriptions of the event from eye-witnesses
bring home the suddenness and catastrophic
nature of the landslide. Most witnesses
report a noise that sounded like a jet plane
passing low over the village; the witnesses
also describe a wave of debris, higher than
a house, moving fast and demolishing houses
‘like a pile of dominoes’. The landslide
behaved like a liquid, but with twice the
density of water, sufficient to demolish
everything in its path. Some victims who
escaped the main flow were struck and
injured by flying debris.
By the time the landslide stopped, it had
demolished Pantglas Junior School and
18 houses, and had seriously damaged
the secondary school and many more
houses. A total of 144 people were killed,
including 116 children. CONTINUED >

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35

Of these, 109 children mostly aged between
seven and ten years old, were killed in the
primary school, together with five of their
teachers. It is a mercy that lessons in the
secondary school did not start until 9:30,
meaning that many of those children were still
walking towards the building at the time of
the landslide. The eye-witnesses report that
when the landslide stopped there was complete
silence: for example a local hairdresser who
witnessed the landslide reported that “In that
silence you couldn’t hear a bird or a child”.
Immediately people flooded into the area from
far and wide to try to save the victims buried
by the landslide, including miners from the
colliery. News footage from that day shows
numerous pit workers in their colliery helmets
digging at the site of the school. However,
conditions were exceptionally difficult – the
landslide mass had drained almost as soon as
movement ceased, leaving a dense, cohesive
mass that was difficult to excavate.
At the school site there was little room
to manoeuvre. The last living victim was
extracted before 11am, less than two hours
after the landslide.

The aftermath of the disaster
Immediately following the disaster a tribunal
was appointed to investigate the events leading
up to the disaster at Aberfan. The tribunal
found that the National Coal Board was entirely
responsible for failing to act to prevent the
disaster[1]. Throughout most of the proceedings
of the tribunal, the National Coal Board sought
to deny responsibility, but by the end of the
proceedings the report notes that “however
belatedly, it was conceded by the National
Coal Board that the Aberfan Disaster stemmed
from their failure to initiate any policy with
respect to the siting, control, inspection and
management of tips”.
The NCB was found to be at fault by the
tribunal for placing a tip on a site that had not
been properly investigated. Evidence brought
forward by residents of Aberfan revealed that
the spring underneath Tip 7 was far from
‘unknown’ as originally claimed by the Chair of
the NCB, Lord Alfred Robens. The worker who
reported the first sinking of Tip 7 on the day of
the disaster told the judge of the tribunal, Lord
Justice Edmund Davies, that “no one walking
on the mountain before Tip 7 was started could
fail to see the stream and the spring”, nor
did they require any surveying or engineering
expertise to see that the site was unsuitable
for the tip in the first place.

The tribunal named nine members of the
board directly responsible for the event, and
specified in some detail how their actions led to
the catastrophe. However, perhaps surprisingly
when seen from the perspective of modern
times, no-one was prosecuted for causing the
deaths of the 144 people and for the physical
and social ruin of the community of Aberfan.
According to a 2000 report funded by the
ESRC on the government response to the
disaster, senior officials of the NCB were
not prosecuted because the UK government
in the late 1960s and early 1970s “needed
their help in the ‘high politics’ of running
down the coal industry without provoking
a national strike”.
Since the NCB was treated as if it were
a government department, making them
pay the environmental or direct costs of the
disaster was considered to be unwise as it
would have increased the governmental deficit,
which would then have to be recovered from
general taxation.
Furthermore, the report suggests that the
interests of the people of Aberfan simply did
not have any sway over policymakers and
according to laws in place at the time relating
to corporate negligence, no regulatory offence
was committed during the Aberfan Disaster
because no miners were killed. CONTINUED >

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Since the accident, coal spoil tips have been
treated as engineering structures requiring
proper design and maintenance. A Derelict
Land Unit was set up in Cardiff not long
after the disaster to restore brownfield land,
including former sites of collieries and land
used by the coal industry. New ways to dispose
of colliery spoils have also been developed.

After the disaster, a fund was created that
attracted donations of £1,750,000 (equivalent
to about £30 million today), with money being
received in the form of more than 90,000
contributions from over 40 countries. This
fund distributed the money in a number
of ways, including direct payments to the
bereaved, the construction of a memorial,
repairs to houses, respite breaks for villagers
and the construction of a community centre.
However, the fund itself attracted considerable
controversy.
First, when the fund was created it did not
include any representatives from Aberfan
itself; subsequently, after protests from the
villagers, five places through democratic
election were created.
Remarkably, no other members of the disaster
fund were elected democratically. Second,
in the aftermath of the disaster the NCB and
the Treasury refused to accept full liability,
and thus to fund the removal of tips that
still loomed above the village. Lord Robens
claimed that it was too expensive to remove
the tips, with an estimated cost of £3 million
pounds. In response, the community of
Aberfan formed a Tip Removal Committee to
actively seek out contractors for estimates
to remove the tips. Eventually the tips were
removed by the NCB, but using £150,000 that
Lord Robens appropriated from the disaster
fund. Understandably, this caused long-term
resentment in the community. In 1997, this
sum (but without interest) was repaid to the
fund by the UK government.

1. Report of the Tribunal Appointed to Inquire into
the Disaster at Aberfan on October 21st, 1966.
H.M.S.O. 1967

The Legacy of Aberfan
The village of Aberfan continues to be
profoundly affected by the disaster in
1966, despite the change in population
that accompanied the closure of the colliery.
According to a psychiatric study that undertook
a follow-up of the disaster in 2003, many
people who lived through the Aberfan Disaster
continue to suffer regular bouts of posttraumatic stress. However, the majority of
survivors refused to participate in the study.
In common with observations of large-scale
disasters in other locations, soon after the
landslide the birth rate of Aberfan and Merthyr
Vale increased dramatically, such that by 1972
it has been calculated that more additional
children had been born than had been lost in
the tragedy. This is a phenomenon known as
biosocial regeneration, which is a subconscious
response primarily by couples who had not lost
a child in the disaster.
The Aberfan Disaster also led to detailed
studies of the behaviour of mine waste, and in
particular of its potential to undergo apparently
spontaneous catastrophic collapse. Research
into this mechanism continues today, but sadly
mine waste failures remain common, especially
in less developed countries. For example, in
September 2008 a mine waste landslide struck
the village of Taoshi in the Shaanxi province of
China, killing at least 128 villagers. Of course,
in the UK the disaster led to major changes
to the ways in which mine wastes are managed,
and there has been no repeat of this dreadful
accident.

The dreadful calamity of the Aberfan landslide
disaster remains perhaps the most poignant
and memorable disaster in the UK since the
Second World War. The combination of a failure
of responsibility by the relevant authorities, the
dreadful events in the moment of the landslide,
the heroic but mostly futile rescue attempts,
and the appalling behaviour of some parties
in the aftermath of the disaster created an
extraordinary mix from which there is much
to learn. There are some positive legacies
of the disaster, most notably the dramatic
improvements to the management of mine
wastes, but there is still much to do to ensure
that these lessons are learnt internationally.
Since the Aberfan Disaster, there have been
a variety of studies on its aftermath from the
mental health of those who lived through the
disaster to the regulatory failure of government,
which was the focus of a report funded by
the ESRC released in 2000[2]. This report
concluded that since the disaster took place,
UK policy of ‘making the polluter pay’ has
a stronger foothold in government, and laws
relating to corporate negligence are more
attentive to victims than they were in the
past. The findings show that preparation for
disaster has improved since 1966 not due to
loss of life, economic damage or more obvious
impacts, but largely due to the fact that
Emergency Planning had to find a new role
after its loss of legitimacy in the Civil Defence
programme and the end of the Cold War. The
ESRC report concluded that political processes
in place during and after disasters provide the
context for government response.
Furthermore, governments must learn to never
underestimate the length and depth of trauma
suffered by survivors of disasters like the mine
waste landslide at Aberfan. Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder (PTSD) was found to be high in
victims of the Aberfan Disaster, even decades
after it took place[3]. It is of utmost importance
that the knowledge gained from experiencing
and responding to past disasters feeds into
current and future regulations to prevent
failings of policy in addressing the needs
of vulnerable populations to large-scale
physical hazards.

Campaigns for funding science in the UK
are becoming increasingly innovative
and strategic in their approach, says
MATTHEW KEARNES

In recent years the scientific establishment
has been through something of a theological
moment. With the combined effects of
continuing public disquiet about the trajectory
of technological change and a policy context
that has increasingly emphasised strategic
investments in research, scientists and
scientific organisations have begun, perhaps
like never before, to publicly defend the
benefits of fundamental research and
‘basic science’.
In recent months these efforts have crystallised
in a series of high-profile and effective
campaigns to promote the vitality of science
to the future economic prosperity of the UK.
Responding to similar concerns, UK researchfunding bodies have launched a series of
strategic and cross-disciplinary research
programmes. Covering areas of research as
diverse as environmental change, energy
and lifelong health, these initiatives
encapsulate a new argument about the value
of research in the UK; that interdisciplinary
and collaborative research can, through
careful programme design, be brought to
bear on the ‘grand challenges’ of the day.
But these initiatives represent a challenge
for social scientists and the broader
relationship between science and society.
They focus attention on the ways in which
these grand societal challenges are defined
and framed and the kinds of collaborative
roles that social scientists are increasingly
taking in interdisciplinary research teams.
Will this strategic approach, that seeks
to encourage research on cross-cutting
challenges, be framed solely in technical
terms, as requiring scientific rather than
social innovations? Will this approach
represent an opportunity to open up innovation
processes to a wider array of disciplinary
perspectives and diverse viewpoints?
Against this backdrop, the results of a recently
completed ESRC-funded project entitled:
‘Strategic Science: Research Intermediaries
and the Governance of Innovation’, show the
gravity of this challenge.

Focusing on the development of research
programmes in nanotechnology and synthetic
biology, the results of the project reveal that
while research councils and other funding
agencies are increasingly taking an active
role in shaping new research programmes –
by delineating key research terms, building
agendas and working to establish a core
research community in emerging fields – a set
of underlying policy narratives about the power
of science to produce social progress continues
to shape institutional practice.
The results of this research suggest that this
‘definitional work’, though often couched in
technical terms, typically involves questions of
fundamental societal significance. For example,
the emerging field of synthetic biology is
increasingly defined as the rational design of
‘biologically-based parts’, ‘novel devices and
systems’ and the redesign of ‘existing natural
biological systems’. This definition shows the
desire to make the ‘engineering of biology
easier and more predictable’, and is tied to a
range of expected applications in areas such
as biofuels and pharmaceuticals. In turn, this
definitional work has the effect of tying the
field to a largely unquestioned future.

The findings of the Strategic Science project
suggest the challenge facing social scientists
in an increasingly strategic policy context
and highlight the importance of a thorough
investigation of how new research programmes
and questions are defined. A number of
social scientists are making important steps
in this direction – developing new modes
of engagement and collaboration with the
natural and physical scientists. For example,
in the area of synthetic biology, an ESRCfunded network of social scientists (www.
genomicsnetwork.ac.uk/) are working to build a
‘post-ethical, legal, and social issues’ approach
to the life sciences that explores the ways that
scientific fields are constituted and sustained.
This work will be an important step in
reimagining the roles that social scientists may
play in critical collaboration with their natural
and physical science colleagues.
Dr Matthew Kearnes is based at the University of
New South Wales, Australia. His research at IHRR
focused on public perception of emerging science
and technologies including nanotechnology and
synthetic biology along with science and governance.

Self-replicating synthetic bacteria
(J. Craig Venter Institute).

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Alex
Densmore

A large part of Alex’s research is devoted
to understanding how earthquakes
affect the landscape, creating a range
of secondary hazards which lie at the
core of the IHRR programme ‘When the
Shaking Stops’. His research also has
to do with the way mountain ranges are
built and destroyed – that is, with the
interactions between earthquakes and
active tectonic processes that create high
topography and the erosional processes

(which are often hazards in themselves)
that pull mountains back down again.
This requires: looking at the landscape to
find evidence of past earthquakes, finding
out where and how active the faults are,
and determining when the most recent
earthquakes took place. While searching
for signs of earthquakes that occurred
in the past, Alex is also researching the
environmental impacts of groundwater
extraction in northwestern India under

past, present and future climate
conditions. This research investigates
how groundwater used for irrigation in the
region is dependent upon local geology,
such as the presence or absence of
buried river channels. Predicted changes
in the Indian monsoon over the next 50100 years influenced by climate change
could have serious, but largely unknown
effects on this critical resource.

Sarah
Curtis

As the director of Frontier Knowledge
programme at IHRR, Sarah is generally
interested in how different projects led by
IHRR researchers break with convention
in order to think in new ways about
hazard, risk and resilience. IHRR aims to
bring together researchers from different
disciplines to find original ways to study
many of the complex problems the world
faces today because no single discipline
provides sufficient expertise to tackle
issues of hazard, risk and resilience in
a comprehensive way.

Many of the projects fostered through
IHRR bring together experts in the
humanities, social and physical sciences.
This produces novel ways to think about
the ‘whole systems’ that are important for
hazard and risk and for vulnerability and
resilience. Sarah’s own research focuses
on the links between human health and
the social and physical environment. It
shows how and why places are important
for our health as well as our individual
characteristics and the medical care
we use.

Much of her research fits well with the
interdisciplinary model that IHRR is aiming
to encourage. For example, environmental
impacts, including climate change, play
a large role in human health and can also
affect the operation of health and social care
services that we need to use to maintain our
health. This is the focus of one of IHRR’s
core research projects, Built Infrastructure
for Old People’s Care in Conditions of
Climate Change (BIOPICCC). Sarah is
one of two principal investigators leading
BIOPICCC.

Katie
Oven

Katie is a geographer working at the
interface of physical and social science,
with an interest in disaster risk reduction
in the context of geophysical and
hydrometeorological hazards. Her doctoral
research investigated the vulnerability
and resilience of rural communities to
landslides and debris flows in the Nepal
Himalaya. The study examined local
perceptions and understandings of
mass movement hazards and the
factors giving rise to the occupation
of landslide-prone areas.

Katie’s findings led her to re-evaluate
the roles of both local and outside
scientific knowledge in landslide risk
reduction. Since completing her PhD
in 2009, Katie has been working as
a Post-Doctoral Research Associate
on the multidisciplinary BIOPICCC
(Built Infrastructure for Older People’s
Care in Conditions of Climate Change)
project funded by the EPSRC. The
study investigates the impact of extreme
weather events (heatwaves, coldwaves
and floods) on the built infrastructure

supporting older people’s health and
social care delivery in the UK. She has
also continued her work in Nepal as
part of a NERC/ESRC-funded scoping
study: ‘Increasing Rural Resilience
in Seismically Active Areas’. Working
with local partners, the study sought to
develop a conceptual and methodological
approach for combining local, practitioner
and scientific knowledge for effective
risk reduction in the context of seismicrelated hazards.

Folarin
Akinbami

Folarin is a legal scholar on Work
Package 2 (WP2) of the Tipping
Points project: ‘Financial Crisis in the
Banking Sector: Past and Present’.
WP2 is multidisciplinary and involves
research on law, finance and history.
It compares current and historical
events through the lenses of finance
and governance history. Identifying the
similarities and differences between
past and present financial crises
fosters a deeper understanding of the
financial system and helps identify
tipping points that contribute to

financial crises. Folarin’s research
interests lie in financial services
regulation, banking law, company law
and regulatory theory. His research for
Tipping Points involves studying how
and why banking and other financial
crises occur in the UK and other
parts of the world, with a particular
focus on the global financial crisis
of 2007-2009. This work is carried
out primarily through investigation,
discussion and analysis of several
factors which contributed to and
exacerbated the global financial crisis.

Such factors include excessively
loose monetary policies in the
run-up to the financial crisis, poor
corporate governance within banks
and other financial institutions, and
the failure of regulators to supervise
the financial industry and maintain
the overall stability of the financial
system. This research offers the
potential to significantly improve our
understanding of the global financial
system and the critical transitions
that can occur within it.

Sim
Reaney

The key question Sim is trying to
answer in his research at IHRR is ‘how
do catchments transform rainfall into
hazards?’ A catchment is an area of land
that collects all the water (e.g. rain,
melting snow or ice) that converges into
a single point and joins another water
body such as a river, lake or sea. Rainfall
occurs across large areas and this water
moves through a range of pathways and
a series of stores to potentially produce a
hazard, such as a flood event. However,

floods are not the only type of hazard
produced by catchments, low flows and
droughts are equally important. Also,
the nutrients and pollutants carried
by the water affect the ecology and its
usage. Sim is researching these issues
using a combination of both field-based
measurements and environmental
simulation modelling. He does two
types of modelling: (1) fully distributed,
physically-based, catchment hydrological
models and (2) reduced complexity,

‘risk-based’ approaches. The model Sim
has developed simulates the movement
of water through the combined hillslope
and river channel system. It is currently
being used to investigate the projected
impacts of climate change on catchment
behaviour, the hydrological connectivity
dynamics of small catchments and the
impacts of rural land management on
the generation of flooding and low
flow events.

Introduction

The Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience (IHRR) is
Institute
of Hazard,
Institute
harnessing the capacity
of researchers
from across
Durham of H
Risk
and
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Science Site, South Road,
www.dur.ac.u
innovative, interdisciplinary
approaches to hazard
and risk
Durham, DH1 3LE, UK
research in the UK andwww.durham.ac.uk/ihrr
throughout the world. We are
championing key research programmes in hazards,
vulnerability and resilience. The Institute operates through
Introduction
a growing array of research projects and externally-funded
The Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience
Our research aims to improve
human responses
fellowships.
It is involved in policy engagement in risk and
(IHRR) is harnessing the capacity of researchers
to both age-old hazards such as volcanoes,
hazard
debates
across much of the globe, strategy
from across Durham University to make a
earthquakes, landslides and floods as well as
with industry and wider stakeholders and also
difference to how we live with emerging hazards
the new and uncertaindevelopment
risks of climate change,
and risks. IHRR is a nerve centre for innovative,
surveillance, terror, banking
and emerging
research
consultancy. Our research aims to improve human
interdisciplinary approaches to hazard and risk
technologies. It also focuses particularly on the
responses
to both age-old hazards such nature
as volcanoes,
earthquakes, landslides and floods as well as the new and
research in the UK and throughout the world.
of hazard, risk and vulnerability in the
uncertain
risks ofkey climate
change,
banking
and emerging technologies. It also focuses
We are championing
research programmes
in surveillance,
developing world.terror,
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hazards, vulnerability
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Institute risk
radical
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capacity
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development with industry and wider stakeholders
and also research consultancy.

Focus

policy and to increase social capacity for reducing
vulnerability and harm.

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responses
to both age-old
hazards
such as vol
framed in different ways and new theoretical approaches and understandings
to be developed
in relation
to existing
uncertain risks of climate change, surveilla
problems.
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particularly
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Hazards: how hazards are produced, particularly environmental hazards radical
and notably
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droughts,
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HOW TO BUILD with
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The Institute is developing three areas of activity
volcanoes,
sea
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but
also
hazards
that
emerge
in
surprising
ways,
such as stak
CULTURAL HERITAGE
and resilience of communities that have to live local communities
through interdisciplinary research, allowing
and other appropriate
socio-technological
financial
hazards.
with hazards, notably those communities whose
problems to be framed inand
different
ways and new
develop Ainnovative
policy and
to increase socia
jointly run interdisciplinary
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vulnerabilities arise from poverty, changes in life
theoretical approaches and understandings to be
considering how
to minimise
Vulnerabilities
and
Resilience:
thecourse
vulnerabilities
resilience
that
have the
to impact
live ofwith
and social isolation,and
and where
these in of communities
developed in relation to
existing
problems.
dams on cultural heritage.
isolation
and
combination
reduce
resilience.
hazards,
notably those communities whose vulnerabilities arise from poverty,
changes in life course and social
Focus
Hazards: how hazards are produced, particularly
Durham University Department of Archaeology
isolation,
and hazards
whereandthese
isolation and
combination
reduce
resilience.
Frontier
Knowledge: innovative
and creative
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environmental
notablyin
landslides,
D110, Dawson
Building DH1 3LE
The
Institute
is developing
three areas of ac
of learning to live with the pervasive nature of
floods, droughts, volcanoes, sea level rise and
6-7th July 2012
Frontier
Knowledge:
innovative
ways
of new
learning
tolearning,
live with
the
pervasive
nature
of
and
hazard and risk,
through
ways of risk
earthquakes;
but also hazards that
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framed in different ways and hazard
new theoretical
ap
new
forms
of
risk
sharing
and
new
ways
of
risk
surprising
ways,
such
as
socio-technological
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For
more
information
or
to
book
a
place,
risk, through new ways of risk learning, new forms of risk sharing and new
ways
of
risk
forecasting.
problems.
forecasting.
financial hazards.
please visit: https://sites.google.com/site/

saveculturalheritage
Hazards:
how hazards are produced, particul
Examples of Current Research Activities
volcanoes, sea level rise and earthquakes;
Landslides: Exploring both the spatial and temporal distribution socio-technological
of
and financial hazards.
landslides, and the impacts that they cause (Figure 1).
Vulnerabilities and Resilience: the vuln

Examples of current research activities

Secondary Hazards: Examining the controls on secondary earthquake
hazards, notably those communities whose vu
Landslides:
Exploring
both
the
spatial
and
temporal
Tipping
Points:
Researching
the
physical
and
social
phenomena, particularly landslides and river basin changes, in space and
isolation, and where these in isolation and com
distribution of landslides, and the impacts that
complexity of so-called ‘tipping points’ in past
time,
while
collaborating
with
social
scientists
to
explore
ways
these
hazards
they cause (Figure 1).
climate systems, historical and contemporary
Frontier Knowledge: innovative and creativ
banking
diffusion
and
affect communities in developing countries
in crises,
orderknowledge
to build
resilience.
risk, through new ways of risk learning, new fo
Secondary Hazards: Examining the controls on

mathematics.

secondary earthquake
phenomena,Understanding
particularly
Climate
Adaptation:
the diverse array of influences
landslides and river basin changes, in space and
Resilience: Developing innovative ways to build
climate
change
has
on
species
including
humans,
especiallyto in
preparation
time, while collaborating with social scientists to
resilience in communities
the the
hazards
that they Examples of Current Research Ac
explore ways these hazards
affectfor
communities
in
face, ranging
from threats
from natural
disasters
of infrastructure
needed
vulnerable
groups,
such
as older
people.
Landslides: Exploring both the spatial a
developing countries in order
(e.g. earthquakes in the Himalayas) through to
Tipping
Points: Researching the physical
to build resilience.
acuteand
socialsocial
impacts.complexity of so-called
landslides, and the impacts that they cause (Fig
‘tipping
points’ in past climate systems, historical and contemporary banking
Climate Adaptation: Understanding the diverse
Secondary Hazards: Examining the contr
arrayknowledge
of influences climate
change has
on species
crises,
diffusion
and
mathematics.
phenomena, particularly landslides and river
including humans, especially in the preparation of
Resilience:
Developing
innovative
to while collaborating with social scientists
infrastructure needed
for vulnerable
groups, suchways to build resilience in communities
time,
older people.
the ashazards
that they face, ranging from threats from natural disasters (e.g.
affect communities in developing Figure
countries
in
1
earthquakes in the Himalayas) through to acute social impacts (such as the
Climate Adaptation: Understanding the
loss of major industrial employment in County Durham, UK .
climate change has on species including human
of infrastructure needed for vulnerable groups

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